He was an idealist, at once ambitious and determinedly naïve.
Economics is, at best, a multidimensional, evidence-based craft, alert to all the influences on human behaviour, at once ambitious in scope and modest in its claims for what we can ever predict in human affairs.
Now, in a reversal that has stripped a once ambitious program to its core, Oregon has pared back the insurance, and removed prescription drug coverage for things like mental illness and drug addiction.
Given the economic challenges that Time Inc. and the rest of publishing face back in New York, the one-year project in Detroit seems all at once ambitious, oddly timed and ironic.
At once ambitious and charmingly naïve, they are intent on nothing less than a full conquest of America, and to achieve this lofty goal, they roam every inch of New York -- with an electronic dictionary.
The once ambitious American plans for ending the war are now being replaced by the far more modest goal of setting the stage for the Afghans to work out a deal among themselves in the years after most Western forces depart, and to ensure Pakistan is on board with any eventual settlement.
As a child growing up in suburban Norbury, and the son of a family who (Amis once told an interviewer) "had slipped a rung... [and were] frightened of toppling into the working class", he was immediately seized by feelings that were at once ambitious and vulnerable.
At once ambitious and alienated, hungry for fame and fearful of success, he was a decidedly contrary genius who cultivated a position as a solitary outsider and spent most of his life extolling the need for duty and self-denial even as he labored to ensure America's future and his own legacy.
Amongst students and graduates, ex-pats and homebirds, there is a harmony of feeling for a place where form and function are inextricably linked, and the once ambitious concept of a space purpose-built for creative freedom is now a necessary part of the landscape.
