Word: classical
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...reality of life here before the 1997 election of the liberalizer Mohammad Khatami. The difference today is the sporadic and velvet-gloved implementation of the old codes. Instead of announcing new bans or dispatching morality police onto the streets of Tehran to harass and arrest young people - the crude, classic measures that fomented much anger and discontent - the system is employing more subtle means that seek to make Iranians themselves, instead of uniformed agents of the state, the enforcers...
...market. With customers up for grabs, selling services can be about marketing the sizzle?bragging rights and a sense of privilege?as well as the steak. Thomas Meier, head of Asian private banking at Bank Julius Baer, one of Switzerland's oldest private banks, argues that his institution's classic pedigree gives it a particular edge in Asia. Headquartered in Zurich, the firm started out more than a century ago as a simple foreign-exchange office on the city's exclusive Bahnhofstrasse, where Switzerland's largest banks?and costliest jewelers?are housed. "Asians love history," says Meier...
...whirlwind tour of the country. A purposeful but ever-playful host, he stops in Tuscany to poke fun at notions of paradise, but not without criticizing the Tuscans for humoring us. He calls one fantasy "a kind of ultralight meal - stuzzicchini. It's the classic Tuscany book: give people what they want to hear." Then there's the opposite fantasy, equally skewed: "The pasta scotta: pasta swimming in garlic sauce. It's Italy as hell. Heavy stuff. You go to Sicily and how corrupt! Half of that is true." In his book, Severgnini cooks up a compromise dish...
...Severgnini's book is a bit like a lawyer's defense against a long line of pessimists. Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent and prolific writer, in perhaps the most authoritative of Italian portraits, described a country resigned to a downward spiral in his classic book, The Italians. Barzini paints his people as peddlers of "ruses to defeat boredom and discipline, to forget disgrace and misfortune, to lull man's angst to sleep and comfort him in his solitude." Severgnini uses much finer brushstrokes in his interpretation of Italians' shortcomings, which borders on praise. In Crema, where he's still based...
...Some are banking on the digital slr (or dslr) - a digital version of classic single-lens-reflex cameras. Photo enthusiasts pay a premium for slr cameras because they equate them with quality: slrs let users add different lenses, and are known for capturing more light and for snapping exactly what the photographer views through the finder. Canon and Nikon, both strong slr players from the analog days, are leading the charge. Sony, too, is moving for the first time into dslrs with its Alpha dslr A100, which hit the market in July. The camera uses slr technology Sony acquired from...