If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere too.
Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth....
I try to avoid saying anything positive about any presidential candidate for...
And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest because bound feet never age.
