"We don't believe in black and white distinctions; we believe in relevance as a unifying idea in the choices we make," said Mr. Sherwood, who soon after taking charge of ABC News about a year ago read "Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd," a book by Prof. Youngme Moon of Harvard Business School.
Psychiatric diagnosis works worst in forensic settings (and in media discussions) when forced to make black and white distinctions at inherently fuzzy boundaries.
In short, the black-or-white distinction between taxes and spending, which conservatives believe to their core, is much more complex when looking at specific policies.
"It's a relatively new label that, twenty years ago, might have been written off and discounted… but with the power of the internet today to connect people and bring people together, those who don't view their sexuality as a black-and-white distinction are able to form a community around a label," he said.
This suggests that the white/non-white distinction is important in examination of the possible causes for this gap.
Underlining this, the white/non-white distinction also seems important in other areas for example, a recent report from the UK Government's Department of Work and Pensions showed that, on average, children from all minority groups had higher levels of poverty than children in the white majority group.
And before he arrives at a too-tidy resolution of Schmidt's doubts, Mr. Begley places his hero at a fine vantage point to see how few of the black-and-white distinctions he once valued make sense anymore and where his own place in this changing social cosmos lies.
Just about anywhere you look in Italy nowadays, from Alto Adige in the north all the way down to Sicily, you can find white wines of distinction.
Light-firing clays are distinguished by the amount of kaolinite group minerals and plasticity in "kaolins" (high-grade, low-grade, and raw kaolins, kaolinitic loams) and "plastic clays" (ball clays, pyrophyllitic clays, white bentonites); the distinction of three classes of ball clays with increasing plasticity is envisaged.
Whites make a distinction: 64% think the grand jury made the right decision in Mr Brown's case but only 28% think that about Mr Garner's, according to a Pew poll.The FBI counts over 400 "justifiable homicides" by American police officers every year.
