"Wouldn't it be a little preposterous to say that, historically, going back to Ronald Reagan and all that we know about maybe who the Russians would prefer, that somehow the Russians prefer Republicans over Democrats?" Watching the hearing, this seemed like a curious line of questioning.
Everyone longs for restoration, for the son to come home and become simply good, just as everyone longs for Heaven, but such restoration, like Heaven itself, is hard to imagine, and in our lack of imagination we somehow prefer what we can touch and feel — the palpability of our lapses.
We have mindlessly been falling into a hole of individualism, a world in which we somehow lazily prefer to be confrontational, enraged, unconnected with our emotions.
You can see that dynamic at work in Silicon Valley, where investors pride themselves on their "pattern matching" and "data driven" decision making, but still somehow overwhelmingly prefer to invest in founders that look like them.
Your cat will likely feel stressed being in view to interested dogs in the waiting room, and she would most likely prefer to be hidden somehow and feel safer in a box.
Venice is sometimes preferred, though Venice somehow has an inseparable sinister side; witness Proust and Thomas Mann.
"I have heard it suggested that the Obama administration somehow prefers killing Al Qaeda members rather than capturing them," said John O. Brennan, in a speech last year when he was the president's counterterrorism adviser; he is now the C.I.A. director.
This city of work and hard edges, I found, was the Brazil I preferred, and I somehow convinced myself that Burri's photograph, so keen in its evocation of capital, must have been taken on Avenida Paulista.
Still, given that they're the only contenders in the category without a corresponding bid from the American Society of Cinematographers (who somehow preferred the Sunday-telly stylings of The Imitation Game), one sadly suspects they barely squeaked the nomination.
Schlepping Australian novels with me to Italy became a private ritual, and never, ever have I felt as happy as when mired in the gentle sea and sunshine beside the Mediterranean while breathing in the literature of an the island continent where I grew up, a place I knew intimately but, somehow, preferred from afar.
