Word: imperfectibility
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Social science, however, is an imperfect discipline. Referring to programs for young children, Isabel Sawhill, a scholar at the Urban Institute and former official in the Clinton Administration, has written, "The evidence is always mixed. We simply do not know whether they work. In these cases, one must weigh the risk of doing something and having it not work against the risk of doing nothing and missing an opportunity to improve lives. It can be just as costly to not fund a potentially successful program as it is to fund a potentially unsuccessful...
...however, was never part of a sitcom, even if his life had helped inspire one. The victim was the real son of the real Bill Cosby, whose real family was in true sorrow and mourning. And while art may hold up a mirror to life, it offers only an imperfect reflection. The story of Bill and Ennis Cosby, for the most part invisible to the public, was of a richer texture, more complicated and problematic, with real joy, with real pain, with private loss, with humble victories...
...troops in China during World War II, he instructed his wife that their sons were to stick to Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese and not learn English until they got to America for a better chance of speaking it without an accent. As Sonia Ho recalls in careful but imperfect English, "When we first come to U.S., we don't know any words. David would come home from school and say, 'I don't know what they talking about.' I'd say, 'Oh, what are we going to do?'" Says David: "We hadn't even learned the ABC's. I remember...
...from Federico Fellini's 1960 La Dolce Vita. Now the lights faded, the water from the Neptune statue stopped, a lone flutist played the theme from 8 1/2 as two black drapes were stretched over the fountain. It was a last token of love to a man who was imperfect and irresistible...
Some of the Clintons' cultural normalcy is, of course, pure political theater, but some of it is who they genuinely are. Bill worries about his weight, Hillary frets that Chelsea may go too far away to college, together they work on their imperfect marriage. In this they are not so different from the rest of us. Which is probably why, in the early days of his term, when the Clintons spent a lot of time palling around with the likes of Barbra Streisand and, in the case of the President, being attended by a Beverly Hills stylist, they came across...