Word: earnest
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...that Sebastian got it—not only that, but she admitted right away that she didn’t care that much about fashion, that she preferred Sports Illustrated to Cosmo. She knew but she wasn’t knowing, and so, Freeze managed to be smart and earnest. Also funny! There was one part about a girl who thought the best way to handle a pushy boy was to “fake falling asleep when you become uncomfortable.” Above all, Freeze was good-natured; in her editor’s note, Sebastian sounded kind...
...Like those red bandanas hand cut by the Dems, this hunger strike is just another form of earnest, but ultimately unwise, activism at Harvard...
...able to give them one. The latest to miss the mark is perennial top seed DeLillo, above right, whose Falling Man is about a lawyer who escapes the Twin Towers, wanders uptown in a daze and moves in with his estranged wife. DeLillo's tone is crushingly earnest--has he made a joke since 1985? His characters speak in leaden faux profundities, and they're so sunk in post-traumatic ennui you can barely tell them apart. One day a great novel will rise from the ruins of the Twin Towers, but it's not Falling...
...birds of Hollywood. Isn't irony supposed to derive from having something to rebel against? Isn't there a value in learning, for yourself, that life doesn't play out as simply as it does in fairy tales? Is there room for an original, nonparodic fairy story that's earnest without being cloying, that's enlightened without saying wonder is for suckers...
This problem goes far beyond the realm of the curricular review. It is the product of an irony-soaked campus culture that all too often spurns simple, earnest patriotism in favor of suave, detached cosmopolitanism...