Word: game
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...Weekend in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 1978 We turn out from the American School's Little League game, straight into a line of tanks. "It's a parade!" says my mother gaily, hoping we children won't notice that the soldiers have their guns cocked. That night, as Soviet-made MiGs strafe the city, our gardener and cleaner Mir Ali patrols the garden with an ax and a plastic baseball bat. The next day, the radio proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of Afghanistan. Tanks are wreathed in flowers, "doubtless following the prescription of some revolutionary handbook," my father...
Later, Taraki will boast that his coup took both superpowers by surprise. The Americans certainly were: it's rumored, though never confirmed, that the coaches of our Little League game that afternoon were CIA agents who missed the biggest news from their patch for years. All summer, my father cycles to his office at the Ministry of Justice in the sumptuous Darul Aman Palace. He's there to help the ministry frame a written legal code from tribal law, but as the summer wears on, the work dries up. The ex-minister remains in jail. Soviet advisers hustle through...
...when Clinton went public in isolating Beijing earlier this month, it was clear the diplomatic game had changed, and not in China's favor. Beijing had always had a partner in pushing back against the West's desire for tough sanctions against Iran: Moscow. The Russians don't need Tehran's oil and gas, but they have significant economic interests in Iran, and Vladimir Putin, much more than Hu Jintao & Co., had very much been in the business of sticking a thumb in the eye of the U.S. whenever he could (the default position of pretty much...
...major subgenres. The first - the big competition-event show - descends from Survivor and includes most of reality's big hits: Idol, The Bachelor, The Amazing Race, The Biggest Loser, Project Runway. These shows mainstreamed reality TV for bigger, broader (and older) audiences by applying it to familiar genres: game shows, singing competitions, cook-offs, dating shows...
Most of these events struck me as game-changing, potentially deal-breaking lapses. They gave me a queasy feeling that all was not well with Big Love - the same foreboding I got when, at the beginning of this season, the show junked its much-loved "God Only Knows" ice pond opening-credits sequence for one that blended slo-mo falling, a la Mad Men, with what looked like a commercial for Preference by L'Oreal. (Do you fast-forward through that opening when TiVo-ing the show? I do.) But in the past two episodes, I've come to think...