Instant-runoff voting, also known as rank-choice voting, does some salutary things.
And to those who celebrate America's successes in striking back at the perpetrators of Sept. 11, one of the salutary things to come from that doleful day was the rediscovery of a world united, of nations near and far that pledged support, moral or political or military, for all that was to be done to avenge the crime.
The lobby was as clubby as the back room of a saloon, and old residents who had passed each other stonily for 20 years were nodding and exchanging cracks and pleasantries Probably a fire of harmless proportions is a salutary thing once in a while, in a granite civilization where every room is inviolate and every pan is dead.
They may even have been a good thing: a salutary reminder of the risks.
As the poet-philosopher Bachelard puts it, "It is a good thing, even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.....What special depth there is in a child's daydream!" photo by David Fuhrer.
Some councils have undoubtedly done good things and the scheme provided a vital cash injection into town hall coffers reeling from swingeing budget cuts, but the troubled families programme is a salutary lesson in the failings of payment by results.
Some authors, in their conversations this week, revived that 19th-century aesthetic -- somewhat out of favor these days -- of art as a salutary, morally uplifting thing, somehow beneficial to the general health of man.
It is easy to forget and salutary to remember what things were like 35 years ago in those dark and violent days from which we have all come.
If it was not already clear that the policy of salutary neglect was a thing of the past, it would be with the passage in 1767 of the so-called Townshend Acts (named for their sponsor, Charles Townshend, chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister William Pitt, the Elder).
When you feel hammered down by the incessant blaring about the new new new new thing, it is salutary to return to authors long dead.
But the interesting thing about this thoughtful novel – a salutary and very plausible tale – is the way the effects of the party follow Hannah for years afterwards, even while she's at university.
