Word: direness
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...Tasty has been around Harvard Square since 1916, and in The Unofficial Guide's words, it has been providing "generations of street-roamers, students and suits with red meat and bottomless mugs of coffee in their hours of most dire need...
...furor played straight into Lee's vigorous campaign to warn the world of what he sees as dire threats emanating from Beijing. He is convinced the leadership intends to control Hong Kong so tightly that all its current economic and political freedoms will disappear. While Tung was struggling to defend his unpopular proposals, Lee enjoyed a triumphant tour of the U.S., including a symbolically important chat with President Clinton. Lee's Democrats threatened to mount protest marches on hand-over night in deliberate violation of the proposed restrictions and tie up the courts in a skein of lawsuits if Tung...
...disappointed by your report on Wisconsin's welfare-reform program. It assumes that the goal of welfare reform is simply to reduce the welfare rolls. But should that be Americans' only goal? After all, if the number of recipients is decreased but a significant number of children remain in dire poverty, have we been successful? Families use welfare for many reasons: a terminally ill mother, a father who has lost his job and exhausted his unemployment benefits, a battered wife escaping an abusive relationship. Most of these people use welfare as it was meant to be used, as a temporary...
...millions of Jewish families hold Passover Seders this week, in many households the ritual celebration of deliverance from Egypt will be followed by talk of a new predicament. Prompted partly by a debate between two pugnacious lawyer-authors--and partly by dire statistics, which, over years, have become as rote as the Passover Haggadah--a generation will look at its children and speculate whether its grandchildren will be Jews...
Last year, at about 1 p.m. on the 10th of May, Jon Krakauer, on assignment for Outside magazine, plodded toward the 29,028-ft. summit of Mount Everest. Sucking a lean mixture of bottled oxygen and air that only partly made up for the dire thinness of the atmosphere, he managed a single step to three or four heaving breaths. To his oxygen-starved brain, the world beyond his rubber mask, he writes, "was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged...