Word: formulaic
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...Autobiography moves between the late '30s (the Moscow trials, Hitler's incursions into Austria and Sudetenland) and Stalin's life story, which Lourie shrewdly reimagines--a biography enacted within a formula: Darwinism + Leninism = Stalinism. The tough little Georgian survivor, emerging from the Tiflis seminary as a militant atheist, took up petty crime and apprenticed himself not only to Vladimir Ilyich but also to "my hero, my model, my rival," Ivan the Terrible: "Ivan understood the great secret: Cruelty is the cutting edge of history. The deciding factor is always the greatest degree of cruelty most intelligently applied...
...regard affirmative action as a term to describe an employment practice," she writes in an e-mail message. "It does not connote very well our admission practices, which include regarding ethnicity and other aspects of background as `plus' factors, but which do not include a systematic formula of preference...
...restaurant that rests on a formula doesn't do well," he says. "It gets tired, the people lose interest, the standards start falling...
...India has set aside only one day for talks, and says evicting the intruders is the only item on the agenda. But they may agree on a formula that allows Pakistan to save face by withdrawing the insurgents in exchange for the creation of an India-Pakistan commission to review border arrangements in the Kargil zone, where the current fighting is raging, and in which the terrain has precluded the mapped border from being physically demarcated. Otherwise, India appears content to keep on pounding the insurgents? positions and let the pressure of an imminent IMF payment focus Pakistan?s mind...
...been put on a very private ousting orchestrated by Microsoft's president, Steve Ballmer. According to one source, Myhrvold, once hailed as Bill Gates' favorite geek, has been given the golden boot for putting his outside interests before his job. (Not your usual geek, Myhrvold pursues paleontology, cosmology, zoology, Formula One car racing, gourmet cooking and piloting his $38 million Gulfstream jet.) For the past year, Myhrvold has seemed to be on an unofficial sabbatical, out of the office more than he was in, according to a source inside the company...