take in hand

“If Mexico does nothing ... it runs the risk that the United States — out of its own interests — will begin to take in hand the arsenal of information that El Mayo and the rest of the captive capos are surely providing.”

“The heads of property development firms must personally take in hand the work of dealing with petitions and maintaining stability.”

With the revolution, and the chaos that followed, the formation of a Mexican identity wasn’t just an aesthetic project; artists struggled to take in hand the larger political definition of what it meant to be Mexican and what Mexico would become as a nation.

The results proved Machiavelli right: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,” he wrote in “ The Prince,” “than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

Janna Levin opens her chronicle of the long and twisting journey to the moment of detection, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, with a quote from Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”