Word: dismalness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Continuing bad news on the international trade front, and the passion that it arouses, had finally made Administration action politically unavoidable. Last week the Commerce Department revealed that the trade deficit for 1986 totaled $169.8 billion, a record. The only bright light in the dismal picture was the fact that the monthly deficit in December was only $10.7 billion, down dramatically from the $19.2 billion recorded a month earlier. That may be a sign, though not a definitive one, that the continuing slide of the U.S. dollar against the Japanese yen and the West German mark, which makes U.S. products...
...dismal result is evident almost everywhere. Throughout the country, convicts have been crammed into existing facilities until their numbers have pressed against the outer limits of constitutional tolerance. Currently in 38 states the courts have stepped in to insist on, at the least, more acceptable levels of overcrowding. In Guerra's new home state of Texas, a federal judge earlier this month gave officials until March 31 to improve inmates' living conditions or risk fines of up to $800,000 a day. The despairing Texas solution has been to close its prison doors briefly whenever it reaches the court-mandated...
...final say, the echoes of Whitehead's anguished question will still hang in the air. If a society legitimates surrogacy, what has it done? Has it imperiled its most venerable notions of kinship and the bond between mother and child? Has it opened the way to a dismal baby industry, in which well-to-do couples rent out the wombs of less affluent women, sometimes just to spare themselves the inconvenience of pregnancy? Yet if surrogacy is prohibited, has a promising way for childless couples to have families been denied them? And what if the truest answer to those questions...
Well, yes. The colors are dismal. The film is distorted. The director's intentions are trashed. It is true that most old films are junk anyway, so colorizing them would turn dank junk into juiced-up junk. It is also true that watching Casablanca for the chiaroscuro lighting rather than the dialogue is a bit like buying Playboy for the articles. The charge of philistinism is slightly overdrawn. But, on the whole, only slightly...
...American carriers even though they flew a record 6.2 million flights. That is a remarkable turnabout from the previous year, which set a worldwide high of 1,835 airline fatalities, 526 of them on U.S. carriers. For all of civil aviation, including airline, business and private flying, 1985 was dismal: 2,773 accidents that caused 1,231 deaths in the U.S. alone. For 1986 the number of U.S. accidents fell to an estimated 2,580, with 860 fatalities...