Word: essay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...18th century, Jonathan Swift was criticized for his satirical essay A Modest Proposal, which suggests that poor Irish treat their children like food and sell them to the rich. Swift was not promoting cannibalism or infanticide: he thought his audience would understand the absurdity of such ludicrous ideas. Does the New Yorker really believe Obama is a Muslim extremist and his wife a terrorist? No, but the editors thought Americans were smart enough to interpret the utter ridiculousness as an exaggeration - one that fits well into this increasingly overdramatic presidential campaign. Lauren Tighe, Saginaw, Michigan...
...18th century, Jonathan Swift was criticized for his satirical essay A Modest Proposal, which suggests that poor Irish treat their children like food and sell them to the rich. Swift was not promoting cannibalism or infanticide: he thought his audience would understand the absurdity of such ludicrous ideas. Does the New Yorker really believe Obama is a Muslim extremist and his wife a terrorist? No, but the editors thought Americans were smart enough to interpret the utter ridiculousness as an exaggeration--one that fits well into this increasingly overdramatic presidential campaign. Lauren Tighe, SAGINAW, MICH...
...Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr; and in a 1988 Lincoln Center revival, directed by Mike Nichols, the stars were Steve Martin and Robin Williams. The set up to the play's gag: they wait for Godot. The punch line: he doesn't show up! Maybe this is concept comedy, an essay on the deflating and the persistence of hope, but it's as comic as it is cosmic...
...many back-stories, Carter has underlined that this is a stand-alone story; indeed, the film feels like a middling two-parter from the old show. But surviving fans will want to know that Mulder and Scully - those platonic pals whose personal and professional relationship was an essay in heroic withholding, up there with the half-century foreplay of Fermina and Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera - are shown [spoiler alert!] in bed together. They certainly talk like two people who have been dancing into and out of each other's arms for ages. "That stubbornness of yours...
...Susan Sontag were alive today, she would probably be hard at work on an essay. The essay would be called "Notes on Quirk," and it would be about Juno, Feist, Marisha Pessl, Napoleon Dynamite, Charlie Kaufman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bridget Jones, Nick Hornby and roughly 71% of all bloggers. The essay would analyze--lovingly, pitilessly--that category of entertainment that celebrates people who are lonely, misunderstood and defiantly eccentric but who, we're supposed to understand, are secretly cooler than everybody else, if only they knew it. Sontag would locate the elusive line that separates Bad Quirk--annoying, self-satisfied idiosyncrasy...