Word: abstraction
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...This was surely a factor in the rise of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists - the New York School - that included artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Arshile Gorky. In the 1940s and '50s, they all lived not far from one another in a combustible concentration on Manhattan's West Side, in Greenwich Village or just south of there. From their continual friction and cross-pollination, a powerful movement was born...
...dots on a screen). And our rationality is not a smooth machinelike intelligence but a complicated landscape of strengths and weaknesses. We're good at solving reasoning problems if they're presented as social puzzles. We don't do as well if the same problems are expressed in the abstract language of logic. A number of researchers argue that the results emerge from our evolution as social creatures, not logicians...
...consistency and individual justice. This is also a nation of widely dispersed power--many states, cities and jurisdictions. Out of this diversity has emerged the staggering intricacy of death-penalty law, as thousands of judges and legislators from coast to coast struggle to breathe real-life meaning into such abstract issues as what constitutes effective counsel, what is the proper balance of authority between judge and jury, what makes a murder "especially heinous," what qualities and defects in a prisoner compel mercy...
...that said, I'm inclined to cut The Great Debaters a certain amount of slack. It wants to speak of large issues that remain relevant to us today. It wants to remind us that the seemingly abstract issues these young people are grappling with had authentic, immediate and dangerous implications in their own lives. And that we are not all that far removed from a time in this country when simply being black, whether outspoken or invisible, was a highly risky business. The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents...
Avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen liked to say he was born on a planet near the star Sirius, and for fans of his abstract, complex music, it was a plausible theory. He made his name in the 1950s as a pioneer of electronic sound and went on to compose such big, vivid pieces as Light, a 29-hour, seven-part opera that took him 30 years to finish, and Groups, played by three separate orchestral ensembles at once. An influence on musicians from John Lennon to Björk, Stockhausen made news in 2001 for a comment suggesting that...