Anna Karenina

That suite's modest potential for domestication was responsible for the late start of food production in North America. CHAPTER9 zebras, unhappy marriages, and the annakarenina principle DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY UNDO-mesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way. If you think you've already read something like that before, you're right. Just make a few changes, and you have the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. This principle can be extended to understanding much else about life besides marriage. We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success ...»