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How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?

Virginia Postrel

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Virginia Postrel
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 14
Journalist
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Virginia Inman
Future
Tells
Individual
Individuals
Stasis
Feel
Competition
Engineered
Feels
Discovery
Dynamism
World
Embrace
Regulated
Constant
Evolving
Civilization
Evolve
Creation
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Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.
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Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.
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Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.
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The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
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The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.
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Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place.
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Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.
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Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.
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At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.
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European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.
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The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.
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On the Internet, people on the tails of the bell curve can find one another.
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Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.
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Glamour doesn’t just happen, people don’t wake up in the morning glamorous.
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The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.
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In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own.
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