Word: besting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...goofy, he can do suave, and in dramas like Syriana, for which he won an Oscar, he can seem close to emotional exhaustion. Up in the Air, which has already been named the year's best film by the National Board of Review, takes him in a new direction, one that may be closer to his core: a self-sufficient man who doesn't want to be tied down. His Ryan Bingham is a management consultant hired by the bosses at large companies to tell their employees they're no longer employed. And he does so with such ostensible sympathy...
...story begins with a dream. It wasn't the Great American Dream - Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn't sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream...
Everybody knows where the story ends up. Meyer has sold 45 million books in the U.S. and 40 million more worldwide. Altogether her books have spent 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 136 of them at No. 1. The movie version of Twilight, which came out a year ago, made $350 million. New Moon opens on Nov. 20; the third installment, Eclipse, arrives in theaters next June. (See portraits of characters from New Moon...
...reporter, defends that provocative thesis with evidence drawn from biology, archaeology and anthropology. Humans may be innately selfish, he argues, but early hunter-gatherers needed to subordinate self-interest to the will of the group in order to survive, and "the solution that evolved was religious behavior"--humankind's best organizing principle. Ritual chants and dances fostered kinship and inspired tribes to battle outside threats. As language developed, people ascribed their good fortune to the supernatural, and efforts to please a deity later kept order in nascent civil societies. As our ancestors learned to read, they wrote sacred texts...
Gasparino is one of the Street's war correspondents and at his best when describing the fall of Lehman. It's the key battle, in a sense, since Lehman was a major force behind the subprime-mortgage bonds that were the culprits in the collapse. Gasparino is particularly good at capturing--via the profane, telling quote--the high-noon drama of the meltdown. When Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack tells Lehman boss Dick Fuld, "There are rumors that you guys are in trouble," Fuld, the "Gorilla of Wall Street," answers with tough-guy bravado, "It's bullshit." Lehman's stock...