Word: argumentative
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...total number of minutes in a day. Not only is every second filled with activity, but each is occupied with the accomplishment of several actions simultaneously. Economist Juliet Schor claimed in her 1991 book The Overworked American that people have an extra month of work. Gleick makes the valid argument that this month of new work comes from our filling our newly acquired free time with more work. People have become victims of some "mania," using their saved seconds and minutes to attempt a great deal more activity, contributing to the popular idea that busyness is equivalent to vitality...
...fact. And although it might not be quick enough for the busy individual who is its subject, Faster is a fast read. Gleick creates a page-turner through his use of suspense. His chapters come full circle. Gleick is very good at carrying the reader through his profound arguments about time and its affect on us. His style successfully makes his abstract claims obvious and accessible in the small number of pages of each chapter. At times, however, Gleick sidetracks onto tangents, as in the chapter "The Law of Small Numbers" with its many symbols and mathematical discussions, is only...
Prevention is one argument for treatment. Community stability is another. Half of the infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and AIDS will leave millions of children parentless. Even if the drugs that are available can only preserve life by 10-15 years, those years are critical if communities are to survive. And beyond either of these arguments is a basic humanitarian obligation. With effective life-extending AIDS drugs available at prices below $1,000 a year, allowing millions to perish would be a monstrous sin of omission...
...leaving himself open to that valid half of the Democratic argument ("Now there are real facts out there and the economic plan to me is not meeting the needs that are out there," Dick Gephardt declared Tuesday), he's giving unnecessary weight to the other half - that Bush is causing this "sputtering" himself...
...bulk of its sputtering. Bush, who rightly says he has "great faith in the economy" over the long haul, backloads the bulk of the benefits in the second five years of the plan - too late to blunt even an extended slowdown, and if he's making some Keynesian argument about cutting taxes in far-off times of plenty, he's not articulating it very well...