People were craving warmth last week, not willing to settle for the next new thing.
In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing.
But rather than settle for the next level — 1,000 active weapons seems to be the likely goal — the White House should reconsider the entire superstructure of nuclear-weapons strategy.
But in the absence of the best defense, one is forced to settle for the next best: knowing when to remove oneself from the untenable situation into which imprudence has led one.
The ur-text of this tendency is "The Rachel Papers, Martin Amiss's first novel, still unsurpassed in its plumbing of pre-college precocity, but Arteta cannot hold his nerve as Amis does, perhaps for fear of frightening an audience of bibliophobes, and so he settles for the next best thing.
In this particular instance, Moi, unable to capture the fictional Matigari, had to settle for the next best thing: seizing all copies of the novel that bore his name and — to use a normally intransitive verb that has found its transitive form in the vocabulary of despots — "disappearing" them.
