Word: calloused
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people...
...American Dream, they are abandoned to a nightmare retribution. That harrowing image from the newsreel of the mind not only inspired London's biggest new musical but is actually re-created onstage. While special effects generally promote escapism rather than emotion, the scenes of the hasty and haphazardly callous U.S. retreat from Saigon reduced many in last week's opening-night audience to tears...
...keep their mouths shut" about the crime. "It was a badge," he explains. "It was something they talked about as if it gave them status within that group of guys." Youngsters offhandedly refer to innocent passersby caught in the line of gunfire between two gangs as "mushrooms." "That is callous," observes Edward Loughran, commissioner of the Massachusetts department of youth services. "Alienated is too weak a word to describe these kids...
Many parts of the world are currently experiencing heady, heartening times. As commentator Charles Krauthammer has written, we are currently experiencing "the greatest global democratic awakening in history." Of course, it would be naive and even callous to proclaim that democracy, freedom, and peace are on the march everywhere. Just ask Blacks in South Africa, the editors of La Prensa in Nicaragua, British author Salman Rushdie, forced into hiding by Iranian fundamentalists, Palestinians fighting for independence, or the many other peoples who remain oppressed by their governments or still seek independence from neo-colonial rule. And the price of rebelling...
...many ways, this novel is more a chronicle of the family than of Jeremy's childhood. But all the characters are flat and do nothing for the work's landscape. Jeremy's mother is unbelievably callous. She is a well-known, talented journalist who carries her notebook with her everywhere and sees a feature article in every crisis in her son's life...