Word: attempt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more creative and competitive ways of quaffing your booze than keg stands and guzzling. Beer games are truly the finer art. A favorite of the masses, "Beer Pong" evokes the ruthless competitive spirit of any participant. In this tipsy version of ping-pong, players congregate around a table and attempt to hit the ball into the cups of their opponents, placed in front of every competitor. When the ball finds its home, chugging commences. There are many varieties in this game of agility, and hand-eye coordination tends to decrease as the game unfolds. But most beer games...
Rational choice, which grew out of the study of economics in the 1970s, works under the assumption that people only act in ways that benefit them. Rational choice scholars collect large pools of data and attempt to write mathematical models that will predict how government works...
...that often seems short of them. The poster, the fear-masking jeers of the "Love Story" audience, the gas station name patches on Park Avenue kids, all these and a thousand other acts of irony are not a craven turning away from the graveness of life, but a poignant attempt to raise something up out of the ruins of broken ideals without the recourse of myth. Futile, maybe--since irony is never truly constructive-- but in its way, honest. Irony, too, is a form of engagement...
Like all children I once wanted to be older than I was. I remember I desired it with such obtuseness that when I overheard an adult comment that exercise makes children grow faster I spent an entire afternoon walking to and fro in a vain attempt to become eight sooner than scheduled. The extent of my folly eventually dawned on me, but years later I discovered that Einstein's special theory of relativity does predict that an observer moving quickly with respect to the surroundings is, in effect, travelling into the future. Of course for the effect to have been...
Being a little older and a little wiser, this time around I did not attempt time travel. I opted instead for idolizing adulthood, making it out to be the opposite of everything I disliked in those my own age. To me all adults were kindly creatures who cared nothing for the vile pursuits of popularity and appearance and who worried only about truly important things. They read "The Economist", knew all about electronics and conversed about biology and classical history. I thought I saw in adults the self-control, compassion and intellectual commitment that I missed in my peers...