Word: bleak
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...marquee in the past half decade or so. The trailer is almost archetypal: towering oceanic waves flatten West Coast metropolises, impossibly schismatic earthquakes swallow vehicles in urban centers, and all of humanity resorts to quasi-primal instincts while still maintaining a sense of decency and hope in times of bleak despair. We all know how this ends, of course: Mankind survives another day—at least until next year’s version of essentially the same catastrophic event—and the humbled survivors ultimately learn something about themselves, each other, and the prevailing strength of the human...
...drastic budget cuts across its many schools and an endowment that dropped roughly 30 percent in the last fiscal year alone, the university, in tightening its belt, has also given careful consideration to the ways in which it can continue providing its essential programs and services in such a bleak economic environment. And one of Harvard’s better ideas in protecting both its financial health and efficiency has been to emphasize flexible funding and unrestricted donations in the development office...
...enough Eliza has had a minor breakdown, a confusing interaction with a sexy younger delivery boy, and an enormous fight with her best friend. She has also saved her child’s life over the phone. The situational humor in all this tends to fall flat, and the bleak accumulation of incident after incident comes close to reducing this movie to cautionary tale—the cinematic equivalent of birth control...
...Those are fighting words to John Derbyshire, a proud pessimist crusading against America's penchant for smiley-faced self-deception. The National Review writer and self-described "conservative gloominary" leads readers on a bleak tour of modern life, bemoaning the state of our society and culture (the '00s are the first decade without a living novelist featured on TIME's cover, he laments). Derbyshire's no fan of liberalism, but his main targets are the utopian fantasies of both parties and the notion that humanity can patch the flaws that led us to this woeful state to begin with. Embracing...
...novel opens in 1895 in a London museum, where young Philip Warren, an aspiring potter, is sketching the metalwork and camping out secretly amid the statuary. On the lam from a bleak working-class future in England's industrial north, Philip has the good fortune to be discovered by two sympathetic boys, one of whom is the son of children's-book author Olive Wellwood. Soon our ceramist is apprenticed to Wellwood family friend Benedict Fludd, a master potter...