Word: conundrum
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Nixon believes that the priority the People's Republic is giving to economic development may provide a way out of the conundrum of Taiwan. Says he: "There's no question that the Taiwan issue has poisoned relations for the past two years. Some people here in the U.S. took the attitude that they could do anything they wanted with regard to Taiwan, and that forced the Chinese leaders to demonstrate that Peking can't be taken for granted, that China has other places to turn to. Let's keep the problem on the back burner...
...press's responsibility to exercise its power with delicacy, the ability of the printed word to wreak havoc in people's lives, the need for social restraints to balance writers' unassailable freedom to publish whatever they want. It's rare, however, that the book industry faces such a conundrum, and rarer still that authorities try to crack down on book publishers. Freedom-of-the-press buffs, then, will do well to watch closely as a French publishing house and two Parisian author-journalists grapple the moral questions surrounding their publication of a how-to manual on committing suicide...
...fighting is hot, but the staging is horrific. One worries more about the actors than about friend or foe. Part of the blame rests with the set. A conundrum at best, it consists of three-tiered automatically movable towers of ill-assorted lum ber, through which the actors peek out like birds in wooden cages. During the battle scenes these towers rumble about the stage firing off errant fusillades, al most running down the soldiers as if they were pedestrians...
...does Watergate seem to Americans now? How did it change them? History since Watergate has, in some ways, bent opinion toward the French view of the affair. Watergate has always been a sort of conundrum of the disproportionate. How could such a trivial event as a midnight break-in at the Democratic National Committee, an idiotic little piece of ineptitude by five stooges, end by destroying the leader of the most powerful nation in the world? The break-in itself was, said Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, "a third-rate burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage...
...first law of creation: write what you know. The nuns and priests of a generation ago impressed their small charges more than they realized. The steel-edged rulers with which they whacked so many knuckles are being raised against them. The mystery of faith has become a frightening conundrum, and the Baltimore Catechism a joke book. And so it has come to pass: the children of Sister Mary Ignatius have taken their revenge-by Richard Corliss