At such times, the nuanced and expert advice of what they call the rational center — career professionals, scholars, analysts and others working in government and at universities and think tanks — is sidelined or ignored, while emotional sloganeering is amplified by 24/7 cable news and Internet chatter that prize raucous confrontations between fervent avatars of the right and the left.

In Table 8.2, problems of prematurity are second only to congenital abnormalities as the cause of neonatal death.

Here, too, is enlightenment for readers of those recondite accounts of the Eton Wall Game which appear in The Times at St. Andrewstide.

He went to Alaska and made a fortune. Then he squandered it, drinking, fighting, gambling, and frittering it away on women. . . . Hold up! Your dope sheet is way to the bad. . . . Who told you all that? Never mind. I have proof.