Word: efforts
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...musicians like ?uestlove and De La Soul. Yet on his new album, “Universal Mind Control,” the aging rapper replaces those influences with newer artists like Kanye West and Chester French. Common’s entrance into a new crowd implies a baldly careerist effort to modernize his sound. The result is a resolutely generic club rap album entirely devoid of the musical experimentation and rhythmic virtuosity that defined Common’s early collaborators. Early in his career, Common gained a reputation for focusing on social and political issues instead of gangsterism and consumerist...
...skull. What we expected was the sound of Siddhartha playing a solo conceived from the empyrean bliss of the all-being. What we got was an exceptionally slick, exceptionally boring chunk of self-indulgence that GNR could’ve spit out in 1993 and saved itself the effort. Not for its sheer magnitude could it even be crazier than “808s and Heartbreak.” Lunacy, thy name is Kanye. —Ryan J. Meehan is the incoming Books Editor. He is insignificant...
...unsupervised splurge of American aid is over. The Pakistanis will have to stop giving tacit support and protection to terrorists, especially the Afghan Taliban. The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of other reforms necessary - the international humanitarian effort is a shabby, self-righteous mess; some of our NATO allies aren't carrying their share of the military burden - but the war will remain a bloody stalemate at best as long as jihadis come across the border from Pakistan and the drug trade flourishes...
...know what the mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions...
...linked to a broader movement across the West that came to the fore during a week of demonstrations and violence at the World Trade Organization summit nearly a decade ago. Utilizing both peaceful and violent tactics, the "Seattle Movement," as it came to be known, was a grass-roots effort to fight the ill effects of capital-driven globalization. Two years later, in 2001, the movement came to a head at the G-8 summit in Genoa, which was marked by three days of violence and the fatal shooting by Italian police of a 23-year-old protester. Only...