Word: backgrounder
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...comedy is McDonagh's signature. He can shock an audience into laughing at just about anything (suicide, patricide, terrorism, famine), and his expletive-ridden dialogue - its cadence and Celtic slang borrowed from his Irish background - can make even the most banal comment sound like a punch line. Audiences first fell for McDonagh's gritty, witty brand of theater in 1996, when his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane - about the love-hate relationship between a spinster and her domineering mother - won the then 26-year-old a handful of awards and the first of many Tony nominations. Since then...
...canvases in this show are the paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán. His practice was not so much to present as to isolate a few vegetables and pieces of fruit on a shelf or suspend them above it on strings. All are sharply lit before a deep black background, the simplest products of creation, not just seen but beheld, and summoning us from the darkness. What should we make of the mysterious gravity in these pictures? Perhaps just that in fiercely religious Spain, even a cabbage could be God's anointed messenger...
...unapologetic willingness to address theory. In this book, you frequently allude to and often explicitly mention several big thinkers, from Rorty to Kierkegaard to Hegel. Could you talk a little about your decision to directly discuss theory and philosophy in the novel instead of keeping them the background and letting them inform your writing? KG: You get more names in the beginning of the book than you do at the end of the book. When you’re younger these people are just names that you hear in class and that you slowly begin to approach and study...
...Because he was a writer and not entirely closed in the field of academia before he was a scientist, I feel like he’s able to think about and see things in a way that people who all share the same background can’t,” says Killingsworth, the second-year graduate student...
...Meanwhile, even in states that do share mental health data, people can still buy guns without anyone checking the database at all. Under current federal law, unlicensed gun dealers at gun shows, for example, do not need to do a background check before they sell a weapon...