Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American dishes served at her small and sophisticated restaurant are at once surprising yet comfortably familiar in taste. Now she and the artist Paul Davis, who painted the impressionistic seasonal mural that wraps around the walls of the restaurant, have put together a tiny, precise and endearing conceit: The Arcadia Seasonal Mural and Cookbook (Abrams; $14.95). This may be the gift cookbook of the year -- 28 pages opening out in a gatefold reproduction of the glowing Davis mural. Under the panels for each season are a few of Rosenzweig's most popular dishes for that time of year. Among...
...author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute to his washboard midriff . . . Saul Bellow had bipped him on the arm to test his biceps. William Styron, who was balding...
...situation is neither recent nor the product of Cambridge conceit. It is part of a legacy from President Charles Eliot, who, starting in 1869, remade Harvard with a new emphasis on research and graduate study, and, among his faculty, strongly encouraged these scholarly pursuits. At Harvard, as at other institutions, the compass needles of many ambitious academics swung toward research. One result is that complaints about poor undergraduate teaching, lofty and inaccessible scholars, huge impersonal survey courses and cold university bureaucracies are heard on campuses from Maine to California. Like Harvard, most institutions of higher learning are wrestling with...
Reagan, in his heart, remains an outsider. It is a conceit that irritates some of his critics, especially those who believe in the power of government to affect lives for the better. Here is Reagan, still getting away with a campaign gambit, divorcing himself from any governmental action, even his own, that seems unpopular. He has an eerie gift for distancing himself from failures, for behaving, in a bizarre and cagey act of dissociation, as if what he had just done had nothing much to do with him, as if it had just vanished into the air, passed into nonexistence...
...kids.) "No smoking--foreign, domestic or homegrown," one guide sasses near Epcot's 18-story Spaceship Earth geosphere. "You know what Epcot means?" another asks near closing time. "Every Person Comes Out Tired." In fact, the acronym stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was Disney's conceit to create an absolute monarchy, a magic kingdom for real, in which 20,000 people would work and live in a totally controlled futuristic environment: no slums, no landlords, no voting control. Fortunately the plan fizzled, and Epcot became what it has been since its opening in 1982: a combination world...