Word: besting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this year's Best Inventions package, green innovations dominate the selection in a way that no single category has ever done in the 10 years we've been making this list. There's a smart thermostat, solar shingles, the new Philips lightbulb, the edible race car, electric bacteria, lots of electric vehicles and farm-raised bluefin tuna. The remarkable ingenuity shown in the hunt for new materials and products that don't stress the environment is reflected in our list, once again ably edited by senior writer Lev Grossman. One glowing exception to the trend is our invention...
This issue features the debut of what we hope will be another annuity: our ranking of the 10 Best College Presidents. These days, college presidents are no longer leaders of insular academic institutions. They are CEOs of knowledge businesses that spur the local and national economies and foster innovation on a global scale. Yes, they still do a lot of fundraising (which is even harder in a down economy), but every entrepreneur needs to do that, and the best college presidents are forward-looking entrepreneurs of education. At the center of the package is a profile of Ohio State University...
...standard advice for young writers has always been "Write what you know." Raymond Carver did exactly that. It so happens that for most of his life, what Carver knew best was hardship, both physical and psychological. In his short stories--tight-lipped parables of abjection that became hugely influential in the 1980s--life is a kind of nonstop distress sale. The apartments are shabby; the rent is unpaid; the living room furniture has been carried outside and strewn across the lawn. The people seem dislocated too, even when they're stuck in one place, licking their wounds and drinking hard...
...dependent in the military and agree with Joe Klein's commentary about offering federal employees tax credits to pay for health care [Nov. 9]. This is the best way to retain the benefits federal employees receive and more equitably distribute them. I regularly see how resources are wasted and mismanaged. Patients must make an appointment to receive basic medical attention that in generations past could have been attended to by an RN either over the phone or in the office. Calls for urgent, same-day appointments are often referred to civilian emergency rooms, thereby incurring astronomical fees. I see over...
...lifting on the decade of madness that had seized the People's Republic beginning in the mid-1960s. Cheng was an improbable survivor of Chairman Mao's brutal campaign, a porcelain-boned diplomat's wife who spent the precommunist years swathed in silk. Yet as she recalled in her best-selling account, she would learn to "fight, whatever the price...