Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much of Superman's complex evolution derived from his reincarnations in different media. On radio, for example, which could not show the red-caped hero in full flight, an imaginative scriptwriter dreamed up the deathless lines: "Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!" Because radio shows had to be performed by real people, and because Actor Bud Collyer demanded a vacation, the writers invented the Kryptonite meteorite. For two weeks, all that...
...full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire. Lessing's style is straightforward, sometimes almost telegraphic: "In September, of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. He was eleven. It was 1986." This spareness suggests parable, a single accessible version of complex truths. Yet beneath its clear surface, Lessing's novel roils with several possible meanings. Perhaps David and Harriet, in their zeal to create a haven for themselves and what they call the "real children," have blinded themselves to humanity that lies "outside the permissible," beyond their constrained definitions of themselves. Maybe...
...game, however, is as complex as a grand-master chess tournament, and by the end of the trip Shultz had made his boldest move yet: offering the players the first U.S.-sponsored peace plan since 1982. He presented a proposal that calls for final talks, to begin by year's end, on a permanent solution to the Palestinian question. While many predicted Shultz's scheme would quickly be checkmated, the Secretary said, "There is a readiness to work to change things that should be taken advantage of by everybody. The moment can be lost...
...bedpans for law books, ledgers and briefcases. The exodus of the exhausted comes at a time when nursing schools are reporting dramatic declines in enrollment and veteran nurses are loudly objecting to their working conditions. Paradoxically, however, there are more nurses employed now than ever before. Thanks to increasingly complex medical technology, an aging patient population and the worsening AIDS epidemic, the demand for nurses has never been greater...
...make a game of gravitas: who has it, who does not. Gorbachev, surely. Pope John Paul II. Jimmy Carter did not. Nor did Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon displayed a bizarre and complex gravitas that destroyed itself in sinister trivialities. Does Ronald Reagan have gravitas? In some ways, Reagan seems a perfect expression of the anti-gravitas America of the late '80s, a place that can seem weightless and evanescent, as forgetful as a television screen. Gravitas, a deep moral seriousness, is not necessarily the virtue for an electronic age. And yet Reagan possesses a gravitas of authenticity. In any case...