Word: abruptness
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...Cheever is our little Chekhov; like ragtime, he should be played slowly. The elegance and pain in his work need to be discovered gradually, like the bruised beauty of a sunset. These actors do get the shouting scenes right; their abrupt, strangulated outbursts are appropriate to people who have been bred to optimism and implosion, not to the articulation of rage. And Van Dyck finds wit and poignancy in her several roles. She often has the taut stillness of a woman listening for catastrophe. But the rest of the cast often pushes too hard. Any overacting brutalizes Cheever's prose...
...decisions. Against one of the largest offensive lines it will face, the Crimson's defense put forth one of its best efforts of the last two seasons. And everywhere is between--namely, the offensive and defensive special teams, the squad was strikingly sharp--breaking some long runs and making abrupt stops...
...tacked-on ending seems like an easy way out of the spiral of commotion that the events build up to. It's as if Shue finally agreed to consent and said, "Enough!" But the abrupt change reads more like an easy way out of a fine mess. As the grand finale approaches, all of the characters are running around the room, slopping food on each other, and singing. Their ruckus is ingratiating in small spurts but after a while it becomes annoying theater. Like dupes, they try to mimic the Nerd in the hopes that he'll be repulsed...
...barely discernible when TIME warned last spring in a cover story that derivatives posed a new and little understood threat to U.S. consumers and companies. This risk is so apparent because of the swift rise in interest rates that the Federal Reserve engineered this year to forestall inflation. The abrupt increases reversed a four-year trend in which interest rates had steadily fallen, and in the process hammered bonds, money-market funds and other investments that relied on continued low rates to sustain their value. "In the long bull market in interest rates, people got sloppy and forgot that there...
...independence from Belgium in 1962, Burundi was run largely by Tutsi. But a series of deadly clashes with the Hutu forced the Tutsi-dominated government gradually to share power, even permitting election of the country's first Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, in June 1993. That process came to an abrupt halt in October when Ndadaye was murdered in a failed coup by renegade Tutsi troops, who feared the Hutu were grabbing too many civilian jobs and military posts for themselves. In a wave of ensuing reprisals, 100,000 Burundians were killed and 500,000 left their homes to gather...