Word: criticizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...roving archival eye that selected and arranged these snippets is attached to the remarkable brain of novelist and critic Nicholson Baker. Baker occupies a curious position in American letters: part genius, part crank. His best works--his novels The Mezzanine and A Box of Matches, and U and I, his book-length study of John Updike--contain passages so beautifully observed and perfectly formed that they stick in the mind for years. His lesser works--the sweaty, oversharing sexcursions Vox and The Fermata and his tetchy political rant Checkpoint--contain passages you could spend years trying to forget...
...target of his wrath was, on this occasion and for many years to come, Gore Vidal, an equally dazzling writer and social critic. Watching their strangely genteel 1968 scuffle on YouTube, we are reminded of the sorry spectacle that intellectual life has become today, polluted by such loutish mediocrities as Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter. Unlike the latter, Buckley had a unique talent for making even bigotry seem courteous...
...paintings, mocking taste. Ray painted in a bright, cheerfully kitsch style recalling décor in the background of middle-class apartments in old Hollywood movies. Picabia painted textured abstracts that had nothing but a few primitive dots on them resembling enlarged points of light. (In 1950, the art critic for TIME said they had "all the monotony and none of the scientific interest" of astronomical photos.) And he painted gaudy, figurative scenes of absurd blonde nudes in boudoirs...
...program - including what the U.S. believes was a surreptitious effort to develop the bomb by enriching uranium, a program Washington believes the North Koreans ran in addition to the plutonium reactor in Yongbyon. President's Bush's former U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who has become the most virulent public critic of the deal, said: "Even If North Korea and the State Department, working together, can come up with [a declaration] they think will pass the public smile test once it is released, we still need to verify the accuracy and completeness of the declaration. Here is where State has failed...
...nation’s history,” sparked a public debate on the matter with his 1996 speech at the Theatre Communications Group biennial conference. In this speech before a largely white audience of the nation’s foremost theatrical professionals, Wilson specifically attacked Robert Brustein, theatre critic for The New Republic (TNR). Prior to the conference, Brustein had written several articles for TNR and The New York Times on the dangers of allowing sociological concerns overtake artistic merit in competitions for public arts grants.“Brustein’s surprisingly sophomoric assumption that this tremendous...