Word: argumentative
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...remained friends throughout their time at Harvard, taking classes together and arguing a great deal, though Shleifer says that DeLong “won every argument...
...Disbelief can be useful even in finding a hypothesis. Put on your skeptic’s glasses, look at dominant schools of thought for their holes and shaky assumptions, and then find an alternative explanation or argument. I found that after a few months of studying money imagery in fugitive slave autobiographies that I could question the dominant critical narrative about these texts. They were not just stories of freedom through literacy; they were stories of freedom through numeracy, or mathematical ability and market savvy. Polemic is one of my favorite kinds of essays, but I have found that...
...thesis has to put forward a compelling argument, but it has to be complex enough to be debatable too, which means that a thesis writer could believe that the thesis is relevant, but not that the thesis is definitive, final, and show-stopping. The thesis writer who believed that would probably be wrong. He or she would do well to test the project publicly, on professors, fellow students, and even relatives. It usually takes about 20 seconds of explanation to figure out that you could refine your thesis...
...much of his early career as an architectural theoretician and teacher, routinely operates at the same level of ambition. With his most important projects - and Toronto is one of them - he makes what you might call polemical buildings. They're manifestos in metal and glass, intended to move the argument forward about what's possible in architecture, what a building can look like...
This may not sound like an idea that would go over in Kansas City, but the local opposition, what there was of it, folded long ago. Beauty is an argument that doesn't take no for an answer. And when you're confronted with something as haunting and luminous as the Bloch building, as the new addition is now called, what other word will do? At twilight, when their interior lights come on, the lenses have a milky refulgence, radiating gently against the sky. In daylight, when the glass loses that ectoplasmic glow, there are a few dead zones along...