Word: central
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...lovely morning in Central Park, two young women sit on a bench. One thinks she hears a scream and notices that the strollers on the promenade have frozen in their tracks. The other woman, seemingly distracted, removes a large hairpin and stabs it through her cheek...
...those who care less about science-fiction doomsday scenarios than the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction Shyamalan often wrings from his characters, the problems of the central couple are not exactly earth-shaking. They're childless, he's a little exasperated that she's so withdrawn, and she shared an apparently innocent dessert with a colleague who keeps pestering her with cell-phone messages. Wahlberg does all his fretting with a furrowed brow (which has not two but three vertical lines, possibly a new fashion statement for anxiety), while Deschanel bites her lip and rolls her gigantic blue eyes. Neither actor...
What did Capote do that nobody else could? In The Monster of Florence (Grand Central; 322 pages), thriller author Douglas Preston (writing with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi) tells the story of a serial killer who terrorized Florence in the 1970s and 1980s. The Monster, as he (or she or they) is known, stalked couples making love in parked cars in the hills outside the city, which is something Florentines apparently do quite a lot. He would wait till they were finished, then shoot the man in the head, then the woman. Afterward, he would mutilate...
...Europeans - and most European political leaders - have been self-absorbed in refining their own system of prosperity. That process, to be sure, has benefited the outside world; it has, for example, enabled the European Union to assist the transition to market democracy of former Soviet satellites in Eastern and Central Europe. But it is surely time for European leaders and thinkers to discuss something a little more expansive than that. Out of the challenges, and indeed failures, of the Bush Administration, a lively discourse on the nature of American power has been born. It would be nice if Europeans emulated...
...cool oceanic surfaces in the Pacific that generally produce wetter springs and early summers in the Midwest than El Niño would. The country is now in the middle of a three-year La Niña period. That explains the fierce rain that has battered central Midwestern states like Missouri, Illinois and Iowa. Flooding in Iowa's southeastern corner has been particularly pronounced this year, as it was last summer, mainly because bands of thunderstorms have stubbornly hovered above already-saturated corn and soybean fields. This year, however, the storms have extended farther north, into Wisconsin and Minnesota...