unpresuming

Durbin’s unpresuming, unfailingly courteous, thoroughly Midwestern personality has played against his interests at times.

If he is unpresuming, feed his arrogance.

Co-owned by a mysterious, publicity-shy gentleman named Bo Wang, this unpresuming strip center spot specializes in the DIY bowls known as dry pots, which have supplanted the dip-your-own-dinner hot pot as the de rigueur Chinese communal dish.

“Luster” shows Prieto at her best: starting with the slightest of inklings, the most basic materials and the simplest gestures and, somehow, transforming them into unpresuming works that invite visitors to have conversations with ourselves about all kinds of relationships — between ourselves and our bosses, ourselves and our lovers and, if we stick with it, between our best and worst selves.

No: the United States under Bush and Cheney was an unpresuming superpower doing its proper work, bringing peace and democracy to one of the dark places of the earth by means of a clean, fast, “surgical” war.