Word: banality
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...fact that only 4% of our DNA sequences are different from those of chimpanzees, and that like our fellow primates we are but dumb mammals, powerless in the presence of cheap stimulants (Salt! Sugar! Fats!). The arguments we use to justify our dependence on them are callow and banal - why, for example, is eating healthily equated with being "boring," when nothing could be more boring than being dead? Why do we obsessively focus on the one-in-a-million 90-year-olds who survive against all odds, and ignore the countless multitudes who have had their lives radically foreshortened because...
...will not apply to most readers since most people will never become Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Of the pieces of advice that are applicable to the average reader, many are clichéd and lack insight. For example, in the first chapter of the book, Watson’s banal advice is to “Find a Young Hero to Emulate...
...McCarthyism in his satirical MAD magazine. In 1955, when popular awareness of the Holocaust was scant, Bernard Krigstein and Al Feldstein caused a shock by revisiting the concentration camps with the seminal graphic story Master Race. During the '60s and '70s the genre opened up to the banal and biographical, with Pekar and Crumb's darkly humorous American Splendor and Eisner's landmark graphic novel, A Contract with...
...breathless as it used to be. His poll numbers have been static, with the important exception of Iowa, where he is creeping upward. His performances have been static too, nourishing but unexciting. He has been more herbivore than carnivore in debates. All of which occasioned that most banal of modern journalistic ceremonies in the days leading up to the Oct. 30 Democratic debate: a fevered, unsolicited-advice orgy. None of the advice was substantive, of course. It was all about tactics. He had to attack Hillary Clinton. He had to make his move or lose - which, given the tendency...
...even want to eat.” As with any love story, the ending makes or breaks all: Will they get together? It is here that Vargas Llosa’s train runs out of steam. For such an unconventional story with such unconventional characters, the ending is painfully banal: the bad girl returns to her schoolboy sweetheart. The bad girl-turned-good ending is wholly uncompelling. “At least admit I’ve given you the subject for a novel. Haven’t I, good boy?” Otilita tritely says...