Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Roosevelt made another great contribution: he escorted onto the century's stage a remarkable woman, his wife Eleanor. She served as his counterpoint: uncompromisingly moral, earnest rather than devious, she became an icon of feminism and social justice in a nation just discovering the need to grant rights to women, blacks, ordinary workers and the poor. She discovered the depth of racial discrimination while touring New Deal programs (on a visit to Birmingham in 1938, she refused to sit in the white section of the auditorium), and subsequently peppered her husband with questions over dinner and memos at bedtime. Even...
Until last week Firing Line was there to remind us that TV didn't have to be that way. The show was spawned in the earnest mid-'60s, before popular culture swallowed up the middlebrow and "educational TV" became a comical oxymoron. During last week's taping, Buckley told his guests about David Susskind, the talk pioneer from the 1950s who was host of a show called Open End. "Every night he'd go on the air with some guests at 9," Buckley said, "and he'd keep going--an hour, two hours, three--until he got bored...
...buying bottled water, storing money in a secret place, and stocking up on flint and lighter fluid," he says, earnest despite his mock-serious tone. He advises others to be ready for the worst as well, despite his doubts that serious problems will occur...
...meal. That's when James Labe, the tea sommelier, will bring out a platter of 10 loose-leaf teas. Some neophytes might balk at offerings like Bao Jong, a honey-tasting Taiwanese tea, which goes for $10 a pot. Madden, 45, who only started drinking such teas in earnest two years ago, not only ordered a pot; she also handed Labe $120 for a 6-oz. bag to take home. "I know this sounds crazy," she says, "but once you know the difference, you'll pay that...
...kind of cheap inspiration imparted by this excerpt from the weakest section of The Cure at Troy is perfect for earnest and boring lightweights like Doubletake Magazine which takes the same quote as its mantra but one would really expect more substance from Gordimer, whose fiction breathes with implacable moral force...