Word: flatted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...telling of Nan's story, however, that the book really falls flat. Rather predictably, the swift transition from starving student-poet to middle-class business owner leaves him spiritually barren. He spends grueling days behind a fiery wok pondering how to balance his duty as a breadwinner with his duty as a poet. His writer friends are getting noticed, and he's not. (If you read his verses, appended at the end of the book, you'll see why. "Don't blame me if I am such a man/ who goes to ball games as a major fan," Nan chimes...
...Crying for the Past Yet much is riding on this election. Not only must it reintroduce a semblance of democracy after 15 months of flat-footed military rule, it must also restore the Thai people's faith in a political system that generated so much division and bitterness that the military was emboldened to send in its tanks. Sadly, restoring that faith is looking like a dim prospect. "This election is already well known for having almost every questionable, old politician from the bad old days of corrupt governments," commented the Bangkok Post in an editorial. Corruption appears rife...
Outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers. But entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services--from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa--to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child...
...high schools. With respect to college rankings at least, which we are best positioned to judge, the rankings do far more harm than good. Any system of shorthand that tries to generalize the individual match between students and colleges—particularly through rankings—will fall flat. The qualities of a college include far more than statistics about retention rates, average SAT scores, and faculty-to-student ratios. The U.S. News ranking in particular encourages bad choices and an unhealthy focus on prestige and elitism. If the list is useful for anything at all, it would only...
...gods must be an ironic bunch. When I visited Mumbai, India, this June, the air was thick with humidity and heavy monsoon rains flooded the crowded streets. Yet even in my grandparents’ flat in the upscale suburb of Bandra—home to Bollywood’s glamorous film stars—low water pressure in the public pipeline meant that the plumbing system worked only two or three hours a day, often in the middle of the night. My grandparents have made do for years by adapting their cooking habits and keeping a bucket of water handy...