Word: despairful
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...Bartlett Giamatti, the new president of Yale University: "In 15 years, Yale will be more expensive, there will be 1 million fewer 18-year-olds, the capacity to place Ph.D.s will be rarer, the young faculty is increasingly in despair. But we cannot retreat into a siege mentality...
Despite its impeachable sources, The Train Robbers II is at least a real story about small-time overreachers whose moment of glory rapidly dimmed into a life time of despair, anxiety, prison tedium and the need to peddle their questionable confessions. Their literary accessory after the dubious facts tries to keep his end of the bargain. But he finally falters, at tempting to balance his conscience and his contract. -R.Z. Sheppard
Citing reasons why the United States and the Soviet Union have avoided a nuclear confrontation, Bundy said that neither state possessed "a suicidal frenzy of expansion or despair" that characterized Hitler's Germany. Both countries realized that nuclear weapons were catastrophically different from conventional weapons and that restraint was vital for survival, he added...
Much of that thesis is sensible enough. The critic George Steiner has argued that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason." But that elegant despair, which would not desecrate the victims by recording their tales, contradicts the imperative to repeat the facts frequently, from one generation to the next, precisely to keep the victims from the oblivion that the Nazis desired for the entire Jewish race. It pays to be impatient with anyone who says a story is too terrible to be told...
...those of the courting age, from 17 or so to 25 or 28. Because married women were usually considered off limits, the focus of male desire was officially rather narrow. In a film like All About Eve, a bitter, bitchy Darwinism could drive the Bette Davis character to despair as she hit 40, looked over her shoulder, and saw her youthful doppelganger clawing to replace her. Girls reaching 25 would start to panic about finding a husband, and many, two or three years later, would marry slobs just to change their sexual prefixes...