Word: trivia
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...nomadic Richardson moves, the morale around him seems to rise. The men with whom he works most closely consider him not only warm but witty. His mind is widely regarded as brilliant, with a bureaucrat's invaluable-and rare-capacity both to retain intricate detail and discard unproductive trivia, keeping basic goals in focus. His aim at HEW, he explained, was "to get away from the hypnotic absorption in tending the machinery and to look outward at what is happening to people." Richardson not only contends that HEW, which has 280 programs and a budget larger than that...
...social problems, these schools offer only "the pretense of free choice within a carefully constructed framework of contrived and managed possibilities." Moreover, the schools' "ideological antisepsis" guarantees that no child "will ever choose spontaneously to learn of things which lie outside the province of privilege, the kingdom of trivia, or the boundaries of self-gratification...
...thoughtful collection of essays, Sanford J. Unger has written, almost overwritten, an account of the ways that the press handled the Pentagon Papers and the course of the legal action that accompanied them. The book tends to be heavier on narrative than analysis, and includes a phenomenal amount of trivia surrounding the publication of the Papers...
...trivia is very intriguing. The idea of the Chief Justice of the United States meeting reporters who have come to visit him in the middle of the night with a long-barrelled pistol is a novelty of considerable entertainment value. Descriptions of the Rand Corporation are interesting, though they tend to focus more on the place's interior decoration and mickey-mouse office rules than its serious functioning. But by itself the trivia is insufficient to carry the book, and aside from that there is not that much there...
...tentative conclusion, he doesn't develop such musings into a sustained explanation of the underlying motivation for prosecution or for publication. If he had he would probably have produced a longer and more boring book, but as it is, he merely explores some alternately tedious and fascinating trivia tangentially related to the issues involved in the Papers...