Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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American leaders usually speak of Africa in the abstract, as a problem in need of solution: a place of epidemic, hunger, genocide or coup d'etat. On Saturday, Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, came to Ghana to speak about the continent in the personal and the particular, as his own ancestral homeland for which he now offered a vision. (See TIME's photos of Liberia's Ellen Johnson Sirleaf...
...this astonishing mishmash of Hasbro advertising copy and every movie in the good-vs.-evil ilk. But Revenge is director Michael Bay at his purest: gleaming machines, humans that glisten with an omnipresent layer of sweat, dozens of locations and a story line so messy it borders on the abstract. He's even given one of the Decepticons testicles (brass, swinging). The whole experience is like having your nose pressed into Bay's manly armpit for 2½ hours...
...argued coolly that people's participation lent legitimacy to an undemocratic regime's flawed electoral process. At the time, I found her view frustratingly staid, the stance of someone who had lost touch with young people's immediate concerns. I felt that boycotting elections made a prize of abstract ideals over daily realities. I had experienced Iran in both the repressive late 1990s and the relatively more open years of reformist President Mohammed Khatami, and not choosing a more open government - however imperfect the process of choice - seemed inconceivable...
Tyler's video is an abstract, vaguely artistic interpretation of falling in and out of love - that is what "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is about, right? - a cinematic version of bad hotel art. It jumps from romantic cliché to cliché, with several non sequiturs thrown in for effect, and the literal version exploits them all. What do fencers have to do with love? What do gymnasts have to do with love? What do fencers have to do with gymnasts? What sort of school allows people to fence, do backflips and play football in the same room...
Tiller was the rare physician willing to follow America's ambivalence about abortion to its ragged edge. In his drab clinic here with hospital beds in the basement, Tiller performed not only comparatively abstract early procedures but also grimly literal late-term abortions. Most people don't want to think about the work Tiller did, but some had no choice - either they needed to see him or they felt duty-bound to try to stop him. (Read "The Grass-Roots Abortion...