Word: causticity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Other holiday-card designers are downright caustic. Order of St. Nick, based in Davenport, Iowa, has a Depressing Times section, which includes a card with a stark black-and-white photo of a man with tattered clothing, a dirt-smudged face and a thought bubble that reads, "The more I drink, the less I care that we lost our home in the subprime mortgage crisis." Another of its Dust Bowl-era holiday cards features a woman wrapping a gift. "I made you a Christmas present!" reads the front cover. On the inside: "But I had to burn...
...awkward teen through the eyes of his white benefactor. Leigh Anne's first visit to Michael's old neighborhood is treated like Margaret Mead landing on Samoa. She delivers tough love to Michael's mother and tough lip to the local drug lords. At times, she can be caustic to her beloved charge. At the end, as Michael goes off to college, she tells him, "If you get a girl pregnant .... I will cut off your penis." Moviegoers, of whatever race, laugh affectionately at this line, so impressed are they by an adoptive mother's drive to make a dream...
...remark didn’t strike me as particularly odd. I’d grown accustomed to similar digs over the past three years in a network of caustic and insightful peers. But when framed in the context of competitiveness, the comment seemed a bit more upsetting. Maybe the academic rivalry was not overwhelming at Harvard, but didn’t the stress of personal competition fill every day and every interaction? Who was working where? Who was going someplace exotic for J-term? Whose social life seemed more fulfilling? Who seemed happy...
Hearing Blagojevich sermonize about corrupt politicians strikes plenty of people as the height of chutzpah. But Blagojevich is a creature of his times, the purest embodiment of a culture in which scorn is just another form of attention. And few people are as capable of smiling their way through caustic interviews and brutal daily encounters. Blagojevich, a former Golden Gloves boxer, seems convinced - perhaps by the fans who still snap up his bobblehead dolls on eBay or stop him on the street to pose for pictures - that he can brawl his way back to respectability. "When the facts come...
...moving to the U.S. this fall for graduate studies. "But there is no future here for me," he says, explaining that he is on a government blacklist for desirable jobs because of his involvement in protests throughout the past decade. Yet at the same time, Ahmadinejad's caustic criticism of the West has made the task of securing visas next to impossible. Many of those interviewed said they hoped for better ties to the rest of world...