Word: bore
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...larger arenas. Bart holds certain truths to be self-evident. Chief among these is his unfashionable conviction that individualism must cease when it threatens the legitimate, shared concerns of community. This belief is not a late-blooming flower of incipient dotage. As a fledgling professor during the 1960s, Giamatti bore the plumage of the counterculture. His clothes were rumpled, his hair longish; he sported a goatee and an unassuming, downscale, fist-around-a- can-of-beer manner. Students were attracted by this charisma. They enrolled in his courses and came out of them equally entranced by their teacher...
...that in her memories and fantasies, Linda pines for a figure of innocence, guile, power, vulnerability. Someone who understands and needs her. Something better than a man. A boy. A child. Her child. The child she conceived at 15 in a tussle with a fairground Casanova. The son she bore and, within two days, was forced to give up. If she can find him, 20 years later, perhaps she can reclaim the dreams of her youth and get a first grip on maturity. "Come soon," she whispers through the mirror to her onetime son and would-be lover. "Come today...
Dukakis' TV reviews have jumped around in approximate relationship to the polls. Early on he was derided as an untelegenic bore. After Atlanta, his TVQ soared. Now a backlash is setting in ("His tone is at once annoyed and complacent, that of a self-satisfied scold" -- George Will). In truth, Dukakis may be close to the ideal TV candidate: physically ungainly and ill- proportioned when seen from a distance but a compelling presence in close- up. His speaking style is a good blend of the conversational and the resonant, and he makes the canniest use of pauses since Jack Benny...
This seemingly implacable trend forced Democrats into small-bore strategies as they sought to concentrate on the minimum of states necessary to yield 270. But this year promises to be different. After Labor Day, Dukakis and Bush should be about evenly matched in electoral votes they can probably count on. A careful look at the map shows Bush and Dukakis each starting with relatively reliable bases almost identical in size -- 115 electoral votes for Bush, 112 for Dukakis...
Protestant scholars in Germany took the lead in the early 19th century, similarly sifting the New Testament for evidence of the flesh-and-blood Nazarene beneath the "myths." Often their Jesus turned out to be an inspirational preacher who bore a suspicious resemblance to a 19th century German. But by the 20th century, the great Protestant critic Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg University had concluded that such quests were fruitless. The Bible is so much an article of faith, so laden with unprovable events and legends, he contended in 1926, that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life...