Word: argumentative
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...their children's ability to imagine for themselves what happens inside a book or tainting their desire to ever pick one up. Soon enough, the thinking goes, our kids will be terminal couch potatoes, unable to conjure up anything more adventurous than an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. This argument intensifies as the holiday movie season kicks into full gear with the Dec. 19 release of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in a $300 million trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy cycle...
...these pieces are so brief, The Devil’s Larder lacks the narrative intricacy that made Being Dead so appealing, and some readers might not fully appreciate Crace’s brevity, or the neatness necessary in such short pieces. Taken collectively, the 64 sketches make a convincing argument about food’s surprising significance in human social life, but Crace’s skill is such that this becomes apparent even in the smallest of portions...
Enter the patriotic consumer. The argument is clear: if you fulfill your national duty this year and take on a little more debt, we could all be better off by the spring (forget, of course, that you already pay taxes according to a similar principle...
...point about Lane’s roommates “enjoying more space,” we can only say that as an Expos preceptor, we’d expect something more germane to his argument. However Weinberger makes one last argument in this closing paragraph that contains the least logic of all: he charges that the travesty in Lane’s leaving is that he denies a student who “belonged here” a spot. Exactly who does Weinberger think he is to make such a presumptuous comment? Is Weinberger just the pen name...
...despite the rhetoric that Harvard acts more like a business than a school, the education the University provides and the research it supports is of immense value to the nation and the world—and there’s no serious argument that Harvard Corporation members are skimming off the top. Yes, Harvard is a large institution, but it still needs money to function, and to get money it sometimes invests in taxable real estate. The sheer scale of its $19 billion endowment just makes the University more impersonal (and not less effective) in the course of doing good...