After that defeat in April, a friend gave Mr. Obama an urgent piece of advice: "Put your hand on the tiller".
The result is his best record since the 1996 release "String Trio," a lean, urgent piece of work that holds together Satie's meticulous minimalism and Coltrane's chaotic maximalism in a taut, delicate balance.
Part of Mr. Kimbrough's originality takes the form of an almost passive or Zenlike approach to an active situation; his solo in an urgent piece called "Groveling" was a sustained rubato rhapsody, and otherwise he plays cloudlike chords where you would normally expect rhythmic stabs.
The Federer essay, by contrast, is a much more urgent piece of writing, and that's because, this time, Wallace's arguments do sharpen to a point: the essay ends with the suggestion that Federer has, "literally and figuratively, re-embodied men's tennis" – in other words, has shown that the sport hadn't reached its "evolutionary endpoint".
In the broader scheme of American's gun problems, domestic violence might not seem like the most urgent piece of the puzzle.
"Devil," written by Kelly Masterson, is a hyper-urgent piece of work in which one mistake, and its unexpected consequences, pours like a torrent into the next, such that the increasing craziness of the men's conduct appears, after a while, as an unavoidable compulsion built into their situation.
There wasn't an urgent demand for pieces about literary camps right then.
But can we really expect even the most urgent and rage-fuelled piece of theatre to have audiences rushing to man the barricades and topple governments?
On the other hand, our protagonist's well-honed fact-finding skills are ideally suited to the urgent task at hand: piecing together the strange story of Jay Rainey.
