Word: americans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Iran's top prosecutor announced espionage charges against three American hikers who were arrested in July for illegally crossing the border from Iraq. Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd, who say they strayed into the country unwittingly, have spent more than 100 days in Tehran's Evin prison and have twice met with Swiss diplomats tasked with negotiating their release. The charges, which carry the death penalty, come amid stalled talks with the U.S. over Iran's controversial nuclear program, just months after the espionage conviction of American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi was overturned after heavy diplomatic pressure...
...mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream...
...while optimism is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money - charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 - but about...
Since 9/11, we've worried a lot about al-Qaeda's exporting terrorism to American soil. Call it the germ theory of terrorism--the idea that a foreign agent somehow infects people in America, creating hidden and diseased cells of domestic terrorists. From the Najibullah Zazi case to the Fort Dix Six, we've relentlessly analyzed whether these men are so-called homegrown terrorists. But we've been looking at these cases through the same microscope, always asking the same question: Were these men infected by exotic terrorists from abroad? Which is why the tragic actions of Major Nidal Malik...
...secure position in American letters was confirmed recently with the publication of Carver: Collected Stories, a new volume in the canonizing Library of America series. It includes both the published version of What We Talk About, as edited by Lish, and Carver's original version. That's an unusual decision but an illuminating one. It's never a bad thing to have more of Carver. There's not that much of him to begin with, but what there is, is choice...