Much better is to use the option to reverse search, finding people who want Brooklyn and seeing what they have to trade. Put myself back in the driver’s seat.

It’s good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

She has given up everything but the T-shirts.

Behind every great pianist is a great tuner.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, laments, “The consensus is gone.”

In Fiona’s mind the medical paraphernalia of paralysis has an erotic power similar to that of the accoutrements of sadomasochism. An elaborate brace, for instance, is the ne plus ultra in sexy lingerie.

Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad’s firm by 35. Not John William.

The farmer in Khujayli recalled a car trip with his father in the winter of 1954 near the city of Muynoq that began with a crossing of miles of Aral Sea ice. Now the shore is more than 50 miles away from the city. In the 1970s, his grandfather’s apricot trees died. Salt eats away at shoes here and turns bricks white. “For so many years we raped the land,” said the farmer. “This is the result.”

The journalists assumed that a slum under the thumb of a gun-toting militia, which included off-duty policemen, would be safer than one controlled by drug dealers.
They were wrong.

(Pretentiousness? That’s the noun form of the adjective pretentious, created by adding the suffix -ness. But wouldn’t it be better to use the shorter noun pretension? Or the even shorter noun, pretense? No; sometimes brevity asks too much. In the synonymy of pompous fakery, the mouth-filling pretentiousness goes beyond “characterized by pretension” to mean “affectedly showing off one’s claimed erudition or prestige,” as exemplified in this paragraph.)