Word: aptly
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...seller this summer with Los Alamos, a compelling and literate murder mystery from first-time novelist Joseph Kanon. Set amid the wartime development of the first atom bomb, the book has been compared to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime for its intermingling of real and fictional characters. But a more apt comparison might be to the film Chinatown, with its small-scale moral muddles foregrounding grand-scale moral muddles...
...furnish the presidential mansion, "to fix the taste of our country properly...everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure." Modern Americans are taught to love luxury, to think of it as a reward for success. Those of the late 18th century were more apt to distrust it as a vice. They associated it with frivolity, decadence--colonial rule. Virtue showed itself in plainness, explicitness, pragmatism, "making do," an unfussed directness of craftsmanship. There was, as the phrase went, an "American grain...
...this situation can find one thing to complain about: things have gotten too placid, too settled, too nice. Aren't we really happiest in times of great conflict and danger? The novelist Walker Percy raised this point in his essays years ago. "Why," he asked, "is [a] man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?" Percy discussed the estrangement of the commuter passing through New Jersey: his needs are entirely satisfied, but he feels bad. "The Bomb would seem to be sufficient reason for anxiety," Percy wrote...
...best: the music bristles with self-assurance and vitality, even as the lyrics suggest confusion: "Dig me out/ dig me in/ outta this mess baby outta my head." Tucker's wailing vibrato will annoy some listeners (Brownstein's voice is a bit calmer), but it's an apt vehicle to convey the trio's anarchic passion. Several of the tunes are old-fashioned paeans to rock, including the stomping Words and Guitar. But for Sleater-Kinney, rock is more than keg-party entertainment; it's a way of transforming one's personal problems into something useful and assertive. "Take take...
IMAGE BUILDERS The third tier contains the most companies, and they number in the hundreds, and possibly thousands, of firms. This is the level of pure-cause marketing, where a company is apt to adopt a cause as a way to brighten its own corporate image. For example, insurance giant Prudential, battered by years of negative publicity surrounding its agents' sales practices, last year began sponsoring a national youth-volunteerism campaign. Spokesman Robert DeFillippo acknowledges that the campaign is helping rebuild Prudential's image. But "you can't tie them directly," he says. "We're 120 years old and have...