Word: dismalness
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Even with its carefully tatty pseudo-documentary air, Working Girls is not novel or shocking. Nor does it astonish in its insights. The transaction between a hooker and a john is not complex. The women are justifiably contemptuous of their clients, who are mostly in wan pursuit of dismal fantasies. To imply that this is a paradigm of the male-female relationship is closer to feminist propaganda than to home truth...
...largely to blame. Angered by state repression and fearful of militant reprisals, Muslims are unwilling to volunteer information to military and civilian authorities, who in turn are reluctant to share it with one another. So far, no weapons caches or bomb factories have been found. "The intelligence record is dismal," says Abuza...
Grand Boulevard now houses 54,000 people, almost all of them black and poor. Most are in high-rise projects on the western edge of the neighborhood. A four-year-old living on the dismal eleventh floor of one such building recently set fire to his brother's bed. "He wanted to move," his mother explains, "and he thought that if he burned the place down, we'd move." The fire was put out quickly; there is no money to move...
There are more cheerful places to hold a conference than New York City in mid-January. The winter's coldest weather to date arrived with the delegates and guests. Central Park was a dismal filigree of naked branches; from hotel windows, the frozen ponds looked like the eyes of dead fish. And then there was the theme of the 48th annual congress of International PEN: "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." PEN, founded in 1921, is an organization of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. Almost any of its 10,000 members worldwide, it would seem...
...Atop the dismal failure rate, an additional 20% of those originally offered the test refused to take it, most for fear of revealing their illiteracy. From these results, Barnes projects that 17 million to 21 million adults in the U.S. cannot read. And this is only some of the bad news. The figures refute the impression, based on a 1979 Census Bureau study, that only one-half of 1% of Americans over 14 are illiterate. This survey assumed that anyone who had finished the fifth grade could read, and fostered the notion that most illiterates are elderly rural people...