Brittleness

[David] Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there's even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

These vignettes often have the flavor of case studies, with interlocking themes related to the brittleness of the body and the complicated work of mourning.

In Scotland, the Tay [bridge] fell (in part) as textbook testament to the brittleness of cast iron.