Word: contrastes
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...Consider the story "Addiction," about a gay Singaporean student in London named Alistair. Parts of it are smartly observed, but structurally Poon draws too crude a contrast between London and Singapore to power her plot of a young man's journey of self-discovery. Alistair's parents are caricatured embodiments of lowbrow, materialist Asia. Because she uses the abbreviation k to denote a thousand, we are asked to believe that Alistair's mother has "a barbaric attitude towards money - reducing something vast to a small, inconsequential syllable." His father makes bawdy comments about the breasts of "these Western women" while...
...President was visibly excited on the ride out to the airport and obviously engaged during the immense welcome ceremony the next day. The contrast between the swaggering born-again Texan and the cerebral Catholic scholar seems stark. Indeed, there is plenty to separate them, particularly their views of the Iraq war. But there is also much to unite them, especially at this moment in both their careers. They share a taste for straight talk and simple truths as weapons against doubt and denial: on stem-cell research, abortion and religious violence, they are brothers in arms. "We need your message...
...whether they can win working-class whites outright but whether they can hold their losses among these voters to 10 percentage points or less. In 2000 Al Gore lost them to George W. Bush by 17 percentage points; four years later, John Kerry lost them by 23 points. By contrast, Democratic candidates in the 2006 midterm elections ran 10 percentage points behind Republicans among working-class whites--and managed to win back the House and the Senate as well as six governorships and nine state legislatures. The issues that mattered in that election--disapproval of President Bush, opposition...
...month, Benedict has been lauding America's vigorous piety, which he has said is partially a result of the First Amendment's leveling the religious playing field and ensuring competitive vigor by forbidding the government to pick an "established" church. The Pope has called it a "positive secularism," in contrast to what he considers outright government hostility to religion in Europe. He expressed this admiration to President Bush this morning. But in front of his bishops, for the first time, Benedict gave vent to an idea that he has usually presented only as a brief, if dark, caveat: that...
...irony is that while Obama may have never been your average Joe, until joining the Senate just three years ago he was something pretty close to it: driving his own cars, answering his own phone, cooking his famous chili for friends and still paying off his student loans. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has been in Washington for more than a decade and John McCain, who has also thrown a few elitist jabs Obama's way, has been there more than two decades...