Word: failings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Friday night proved a test, one Harvard appeared doomed to fail until mid-way through the second period...
Most people would leave questions like those as rhetorical and quietly tiptoe away, but Jared Diamond asks and relentlessly answers them in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking; 575 pages). Diamond, a professor of geography (surely an endangered species itself) at the University of California, Los Angeles, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for the best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel, his attempt to understand how Western nations rose to political and technological pre-eminence (the title gives you a pretty good hint). In Collapse, he's a little like the title character in Dr. Seuss...
...Boeing R&D was $2.74 billion, representing 11.9% of the company's profits. That argument has stung Boeing, especially since it is involved in investigations of illegal or unethical behavior in its relationship with the Pentagon. Boeing has already fired two executives and is cooperating with authorities. But Europeans fail to mention that Airbus' majority stakeholders (the Franco-German conglomerate European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co. and BAe Systems, based in Britain) have significant military businesses too. The Europeans also object to state governments' providing tax benefits or other subsidies to Boeing. Says Airbus' Forgeard: "We want a level playing field...
...tour with his band the Wailers, he found that some white audiences wouldn't open up to his radical message, while black fans weren't even showing up for his concerts. In an August 11, 1973 Melody Maker review of a Wailers gig in New York City (headline: "Wailers Fail to Catch Afire") one critic wrote "[The Wailers] found themselves playing to largely unconverted ears...and, with virtually no exception, white ears." Marley said to High Times in September 1976 "Well, I hear dat we not gettin' through to black people. Well, me tell...
...home to the professional sports franchise with the most losses in history—the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies—Philadelphia has become accustomed to dealing with defeat. There has been a remarkable flow of teams who reached their final series only to fail spectacularly: the 1993 Phillies, the 1997 Philadelphia Flyers’ “Legion of Broom” swept by Detroit and the 2001 Sixers stand out as particularly glaring examples. In all of these instances, the city’s heart was broken. Each time the city went...