Word: dismalness
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Harvard gains the advantage on the intangibles as well. Everyone talks about how intimidating it is to travel to Ingalls Rink, Yale's home barn. But it's just as disconcerting for the Elis to journey back to Bright. Yale's record here is just as dismal as the Crimson's record at the Whale--the Elis are 1-18-3 on the Crimson's home...
...Every book was tortuously slow. Every song was criminally banal. Every movie crawled. The sparkle and shine had been sucked out of life so completely that my world came across as some fluorescent-lit, decolorized, saltpetered version of the planet I had known before. And my own prospects? Absolutely dismal. I would sit in that one-bedroom Nishi Azabu apartment and consider this sorry career I had embarked upon, these losers I associated with compounding the very long odds that I would ever amount to anything. It really seemed there was no hope, that I was destined to become this...
...realm called Pudong materialized, filled with hubris and towering skyscrapers. Shanghai's suburbs expanded into the countryside, with pink-tiled apartment blocks promising a leisured lifestyle to the city's middle class. But in the late '90s, Shanghai's building boom went bust. With occupancy rates plummeting to a dismal 35% in some areas, real-estate developers panicked. So did the city government, which had counted on a buoyant real-estate sector. Desperate, city planners offered a raft of incentives for local companies and foreign banks to relocate to Pudong. Then, in Shanghai proper, they began tearing down...
...really. Poor kids going to dismal schools doesn't explain why rich black kids score worse on average than white kids. Stanford psychologist Claude Steele has a theory that might explain it. His research shows that even high-achieving African-American pupils may be distracted by a fear that they will confirm the stereotype that blacks don't do well on intelligence tests. Steele has tested his theory by giving an exam to two mixed-race groups of students. One group was told that the exam was a simple problem-solving exercise; the other was told that their scores would...
...threat of nuclear war has been countered by the threat of overwhelming retaliation. This principle--as well as the nuclear arsenal that the U.S. retains to enforce it--remains the most effective deterrent to nuclear attack. In contrast, the tests of American anti-missile systems have so far yielded dismal results, with interceptors unable to tell the difference between missiles and simple decoys. No one knows whether it is technologically possible to intercept a significant missile attack...