Word: confer
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Mistake two: the ideal panel for literary prizes is a group of harmless but well-read drudges who are happy with modest honorariums and the free coffee and doughnuts served at meetings. The Turner people made the blunder of assuming that prestigious judges would confer glitter on the new awards. They assembled, at $10,000 a pop, a blue-ribbon panel including not only Styron, Matthiessen and Bradbury but Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes as well...
...might be accepted. It is rarely "accepted;" we aren't here to accept or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret out one or two cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in your blue book, he can only applaud your uncommon perception. For example, while most graders...
...nearly everything about this conference -- its structure, members and agenda -- is in dispute. Syria, for example, insists that the U.N. play an "important role," the better to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the occupied territories. But Israel does not trust the U.N., and has rejected any role for it, preferring that Washington and Moscow co-sponsor an opening session and then let Israel, the Arabs and the Palestinians confer on their , own. A possible compromise may have the European Community, which lusts after more diplomatic clout, replacing or joining the U.N. Israel also refuses to talk with any Palestinians connected...
Washington will also confer about relief efforts with Ankara, which Secretary of State James Baker visited last weekend. But if the U.S. expects Turkey to take in thousands of refugees, it must deliver enough aid to enable the Turks to care for them. So far, the U.S. has not shown the generosity in adversity on which it prides itself -- nothing, for example, like the massive relief dispatched to Armenia when a 1988 earthquake decimated the region...
...19th century. Several thousand people at high risk for the disease will be inoculated with the experimental agent, most likely an altered version of the AIDS virus (HIV) or some portion of it. The vaccine should not be dangerous enough to cause the disease, but enough like HIV to confer immunity by triggering the production of antibodies and other virus-fighting components of the immune system. The subjects in the trial will be carefully monitored to see if they have a better record of avoiding infection than groups who were not vaccinated...