Word: assayer
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Cosmopolis is John Secondari's attempt to assay the urban crisis, and it is so successful that it manages to transform TV journalism into art. Editing shots of teeming Tokyo and sprawling Los Angeles so that they follow one another with a kind of rhythm, the producer-writer-narrator never lets his visiting experts stay on camera too long. Instead, Secondari uses the visual part of his program to show what the architects' voices are talking about. There after, he juxtaposes imaginative plans for cities of the future with the rot now growing at the cities' hearts...
...Pentagon was so unaccustomed to common effort that early in his career McNamara was called on to personally, preside over an assay of butchers' smocks to select one design for all services. He soon established the Defense Supply Agency for such activities. He also created the Defense Intelligence Agency to coordinate previously scattered intelligence efforts, and centralized other key functions. Under McNamara, the concept and practice of systems analysis were introduced. The goal: scientific evaluation of major weapons developments and other expensive projects to determine as objectively as possible the return for a proposed investment compared with that...
...passer. But he is a born winner. He uses all his ability to the utmost advantage and he has great response to pressure." When he graduates in 1969, Dowling hopes to test that response in the pros-which is something that not even Frank Merriwell had the courage to assay...
Others, in different terms and with their own degree of subjectivity, assay contemporary patriotism in even sharper contrast. Historian Henry Steele Commager thinks the dissenters of 1967 are the real patriots. "Those who have the most affection for the country," he says, "are those who are most alienated from its present policies. Those who are not affectionate are those who are selling out the cities and failing to educate the poor. I don't think it shows any love for country to be spending all our money on bombs and ignoring the rest of our problems." At the other...
That is the position of just about anyone who would assay the state of the American republic at this moment from that middling vantage point known generally as liberalism. Two views are possible. On the one hand it may be argued that the nation is entering a period of political instability from which it will not emerge intact. The opposite view is that we are entering--have entered--a time of troubles which, however, we will not only survive, but from which we will emerge having learned something from it all, and having demonstrated anew the deep sources of stability...