Word: backwards
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Sometimes the tea was bitter. Other times it was cloyingly sweet with condensed milk. But the whispered questions at teahouses in Rangoon and across Burma were always delivered the same way. Head flick to the right, head flick to the left. A nervous glance backward. No one listening, not even the waiter shuffling up to slosh hot water into our glasses? Good. What did I, as an American who had the good fortune to vote in one of the most exciting presidential races in recent memory, think of Burma's upcoming national elections...
...achieving real equality; being gay has become astoundingly public and unremarkable. And speaking of shaking off addictions, half again as many of us smoked cigarettes in the early '80s. We watched (and helped) the Soviet Union and its European empire collapse and watched (and helped) China change from a backward, dangerous Orwellian nation into a booming, much less Orwellian member of the global order. During just the past 15 years, we've managed to reduce murders in New York City by two-thirds; grown accustomed to the weird transparency and instant connectedness of the new digital world; sequenced the human...
Sometimes the tea was bitter. Other times it was cloyingly sweet with condensed milk. But the whispered questions at teahouses across Burma were always delivered the same way. Head flick to the right, head flick to the left. A nervous glance backward. No one listening, not even the waiter shuffling up to slosh hot water into our glass tumblers? Good. What did I, as an American who had the good fortune to vote in one of the most exciting presidential races in recent memory, think of Burma's upcoming national elections...
...best book. I don’t dispute that. And in the case of the National Book Critics Circle Award, as I’ve already stated, I have no real problem with its awarding. Yet I can’t help but feel that there is something backward-looking about even giving an award to a dead man. Yes, the work should be honored, but—and here is the crux of my argument—are prizes supposed to merely be reactive? Are they not supposed to encourage further production of literature along with merely honoring...
...Appearing as Anna's would-be beau was a strapping Irishman, Liam Neeson, who became an instant matinee idol by playing the role like a backward child with an oversize soul, lurching in an instant from anger to perplexity. It was this performance that convinced Steven Spielberg to cast Neeson as the star of Schindler's List. The actor had a similarly galvanizing effect on Richardson. Married at the time to actor Robert Fox, she divorced him and married Neeson the following year; Franco Nero gave the bride away, Natasha's father having died in 1991. The couple...