Word: argumentative
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Implicit in Bart's argument is that a popular film is a good film, and vice versa. If critics can't validate that tautology, we're useless. That's why studios screen fewer and fewer of their films early, and if they do, they invite everyone but critics. Until the fall, that is, when they want their prestige releases on 10 Best lists. Those citations sell tickets and tip off the awards folks. In that sense, Hollywood uses us as heralds to our own constituency. We're the fanboy brigade for Oscar films...
...That is where the hard work of trying to make sense of a crime like that at Virginia Tech always hits a wall. We can debate, as we predictably do in these cases, what an incident like this means for our endless national argument about guns and violence and the coarsening of the culture. That's well-mapped ground. What remains uncharted is the unlit places in the minds of the people who are capable of doing these things - and, by extension, in all our minds. What is it that makes individual members of a usually empathetic species turn rogue...
...Democrats in Washington have differences over the best course in Iraq," President Bush said on April 16, in an attempt to appear flexible. "That's healthy. That's normal. And we should debate those differences." Nonsense. The President has no interest in debating anything. In fact, the current legislative argument over Iraq is right in his comfort zone. He can stand "with the troops"; he can argue that the Democrats want to leave the U.S. military naked in Babylon. He can do what he has done throughout-politicize the war, use it as a bludgeon against Democrats instead of trying...
...Both alternatives have drawbacks. In suggesting the "as applied" challenge, the court was also saying it might no longer accept the more general method of challenging abortion restrictions based on the argument that they are unconstitutional on their face. And while a commerce clause argument might cut down the intact D&E law, it might also spell the end to federal laws like the one barring picketing of abortion clinics...
...Boyd says. “That’s when I started listening to old jazz and blues, looking for wackier stuff.” Boyd argues that music took a turn for the worse the day Clark was hired. “You can actually make an argument that American culture changed that day, because Dick Clark homogenized everything, and that’s what the blues and Bob Dylan were rebelling against.”“A lot of this book is about failure,” says Boyd. “I didn?...