Word: distinguisher
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...David Foster Wallace only on the page. His first agent suggested that he use his middle name, to distinguish him from another David Wallace, and it stuck. Born in 1962 and raised in Illinois, he was a competitive junior tennis player--at 14 he was ranked 17th in the Midwest. He studied philosophy at Amherst College and then Harvard, and when he was only 24, he published his first novel, The Broom of the System. In 1996 he vaulted into the upper ranks of the literary world with Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page (and 388-footnote) meta-epic...
There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the human brain is not well equipped to distinguish between real relationships and - as psychologists call them - "parasocial," or imagined ones. That means that some of the benefits people get from pseudo relationships with celebrities may be the same as those reaped from real friendships and real-life interactions. It's just a matter of degree. So it's O.K. to get caught up in Palinmania if her example makes you feel better about your chaotic life of juggling work and family - as long as you realize...
...19th century, intoxicated with les fleurs du mal and the Baudelairean myth of a mysterious alchemy between vice and lyrical vision, now look frivolous from the vantage point of this more cynical era. Over time, evil has lost much of its aesthetic appeal. Society has learned to distinguish between admiration for art and abhorrence of the artist’s moral shortcomings. If anything, we now succumb to the opposite temptation. Mediocre writers like Solzhenitsyn are spuriously aggrandized for their reputations as modern-day saints. The case of George Orwell provides a useful counterpart. An ultra-earnest author of wooden...
Given that the most popular searches surrounding the candidates include queries about Meghan McCain's lunch with Heidi Montag, Web videos of Obama Girl and slogans like "Alaska: Coldest State, Hottest Governor," it's getting harder and harder to distinguish news about the 2008 presidential race from the latest chatter from celebrity gossip magazines...
...stories with the expectation that half a dozen of them will be satisfying and workmanlike, and that a couple will be duds, leaving two or three pieces of real quality to carry the book and advance the reputation of the author. But of the entire trove of qualities that distinguish Vincent Lam's first book of short stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, the most immediately conspicuous is that each and every single story in this book is a flickering, luminous...