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Biodegradable yet tough enough to withstand hurricanes, leaves get their strength from their “skeleton,” a highly ramified network of fine veins made of a woody compound called lignocellulose.

By insisting on a pluralistic regime, they then drive a relentlessly ramifying scene of social complexity.

Despite his conflation of terms, Butler’s history is an indispensable account of a revolution in acting that ramified beyond the theater, even as he vacillates on whether the Method ever truly “died.”

“Historical inquiries are ramifying in a hundred directions at once, and there is no coordination among them,” Bernard Bailyn, one of the nation’s most esteemed historians, wrote a few years earlier.

But in complex technological systems, small mistakes may rapidly ramify and compound into large problems.