Word: contrarians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fare. The celebrity interviews, which make Walters' pre-Oscars weepfests look cerebral, are generous to a fault. (And how. Vieira once gave Wesley Snipes a lap dance--"after he requested it!" she protests.) There are numerous fashion features--Jones has often shilled her line of wigs--and for every contrarian service piece on "swimsuits for real women" there's a runway show of boobulous Victoria's Secret models. And the round tables aren't exactly World News Tonight. Just like your co-workers at lunch, the hosts shoot from the lip, sometimes with suspect facts. In an Elian Gonzalez segment...
...portrait of Ravelstein is an accurate analogy, Bellow saw Allan Bloom as passionate, sexual, a lover of young (very young) men, guided as the Greeks were by moral aestheticism. And yet he was a firm contrarian, deplored action on impulse, and was convinced, almost mythically, of the steadiness of certain virtues and of the necessity of a reflective life...
...Mbeki's position reportedly derived from reading Duesberg's ideas while trawling the Internet for information on HIV. And as a proud intellectual and instinctive contrarian, he won't easily be cowed by the howls of protest. In the end, though, Mbeki's flirtation with weird science may prove to be an embarrassment to a government that hopes to lead a continent-wide African renaissance. But that embarrassment will be nothing compared with the human suffering that could result from challenging the fundamentals of AIDS science in a country with one of the world's highest incidences...
With hope and a dash of contrarian good sense, this writer recently revisited the world of daytime soap opera, reasoning that like so much else in our postmodern culture--Las Vegas, fondue, Rob Lowe--afternoon dramas might have transitioned into hip. Little research was needed to prove this theory false. Sets still seem to draw their inspiration from the simulated Americana of a Holiday Inn lobby in Colonial Williamsburg. And on almost any given day, the chance of making it through the afternoon without hearing someone say, "I don't need any DNA test to prove that...
...personal survival is your war aim, then surrender is always an option. We will never know exactly when the decision took root in the contrarian lobes of Slobodan Milosevic's brain. But three weeks ago, his body language changed. For weeks, whenever he received Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Serbian leader would loll arrogantly back in his seat and hold forth, filling the room with his self-serving discourse. Since launching a diplomatic shuttle on April 14, Chernomyrdin had spent dozens of fruitless hours with Milosevic, most of them listening. Then on May 19, the Russian detected a subtle...