In the background of an essay like "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League" — and of essays like "No Time to Think" or "The 'Busy' Trap," both published in the Times — is the looming presence of the arrhythmic, unreassuring modern world, which seems always to be speeding things up in a senseless way.
The exhibition reveals this little-known aspect of his career in a large selection of casual-seeming photographs, aptly titled "The Intentional Snapshot," that evoke Ibsen's unreassuring naturalism with whiffs of spooky Maeterlinck.
Those rumors of what might be about to happen were joined by stories on the region's deeply destabilizing history, with mentions for the Golden Horde, a fifteenth-century khanate, the multi-country nineteenth-century Crimean War (and unreassuring reminders that that war was the setting for "The Charge of the Light Brigade").
But Jeffrey Kingston, the director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo, said anxiety remained high in Tokyo following Trump's "decidedly unreassuring" comments on security.
The whole thing has an unreassuring resonance with the deadline for drawing down troops in Afghanistan: President Obama says there is one, and his commanders say, in effect, sure — but we'll see how it goes.
Rearranging deck chairs — that may be too strong, but it's pretty unreassuring.
One side will be excitable, critical and hollow; the other will face down appalling news and repeat unreassuring mantras (the trouble came from America, and so on): Rumpelstiltskin versus The Undertaker.After Mr Darling and Mr Osborne came Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats' shadow chancellor.
The final versions of the shirts (which they hope will go on sale in January) will come with velcro tabs to stop any public wardrobe malfunctions, which one might suggest is something of an unreassuring security measure.
Since then there has been that entirely unreassuring set of corrections of previous ministerial statements on Saudi Arabia's bombing operation.
