Futility

I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation.Age may, and often does, weaken obstinacy, by the revelation, at seventy-odd years, that most human things do not matter. — BolithoIn Nevil Shute’s 1948 novel, No Highway, flights of the transformational Reindeer airliner keep crashing. No one can determine the cause. Then an eccentric boffin, Dr. Scott, suggests a brand-new theory: Metal fatigue at the subatomic level causes the tailplane to separate. Everyone thinks he’s nuts, until his theory is proved and he is exonerated. In ’48, metal fatigue was a novelistic device invented...