Ethnic protracted conflicts are no more likely than ethnic nonprotracted conflicts or nonethnic conflicts to be triggered by violence.

But as our urban lives have grown more pressed for time, we have diced our opportunity costs finer and finer; from budgeting days or slabs of hours, we have come to rationing minutes.

A Jardine Matheson schooner came in from the east coast with $15,000 in treasure, the proceeds of hardly more than forty chests, and there seemed nothing better to do than send her to join others on the west coast, for it was thought some opium might still be disposed of at Tinpak and other stations between Saint John Island (Shangch’uan) and Hainan.

In Bucharest, a few hundred coronasceptics -- holding religious icons, the national flag and signs that read I believe in GOD, not in COVID -- frequently protest against what they call a sanitary dictatorship.