In recent years, "rankings wars" have led to preoccupation with excellence largely defined as an individual asset, owned by students and faculty alike.
Bitcoin soared past the $17,000 mark on Thursday, a dizzying run for a digital currency that was worth less than $1,000 at the start of the year and was once largely the preoccupation of technologists or those looking to avoid scrutiny to launder money or buy drugs and weapons online.
In an article in The Atlantic, "The Brain on Trial," David Eagleman makes the case that we must wade out of the swamp of the medieval machinations of our legal system -- obsessed with the ancient and largely useless preoccupation with assigning blame.
Thanks to the "beauty bias," our largely unconscious preoccupation with and preference for physically attractive people, not only are more attractive people often ascribed positive personality traits like intelligence and kindness, but they also tend to be given unfair advantages in both the workplace and in legal proceedings.
That was illustrated at the last election, when the then Conservative Party leader, William Hague, based his programme largely on the preoccupations and prejudices of the Daily Mail's brilliant but rather weird editor, Paul Dacre, and suffered a humiliating defeat.
Here, the preoccupation with hybrid organisational forms largely continues, with its attendant neglect of hybrid practices, processes and expertises.
Before Afghanistan and Iraq, there was Kosovo, the preoccupation of Washington a decade ago but largely off the radar screen in recent times.
Over recent years, no doubt due largely to our preoccupation with the epidemic obesity we keep choosing to lament rather than fix, the links between sleep and weight have received particular attention.
Largely exempt from the preoccupations of the English caricaturists, Töpffer created a species of absurdist antiheroes who struggled desperately, fruitlessly, and farcically against the caprices of fate, nature, and an irrational, mechanistic society.
Yet to some extent the heat has gone out of the issue, largely due to the preoccupations in Britain and the region with the violent jihadis of the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and beyond.
