Word: geniality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shortz is indeed a tall, genial fellow and the best salesman crosswords could have. A puzzler from youth, he took a doctorate of Enigmatology (in a course of study he invented for himself) at Indiana University, was named the fourth crossword editor of the Times in 1993. That was the year of Shortz's 40th birthday and crosswords' 80th. The first one, devised by Arthur Wynne, appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913, and made the game an immediate sensation. But it was the achievement of Margaret Farrar, who became the Times' first crossword editor in1942...
...latest, perhaps most insightful book yet, titled simply Hav. Located south of the Caucasus, north of Turkey and this side of paradise, Hav had drowsed for centuries through Greek, Turkish, Russian and British occupations, wars of all colors and a League of Nations mandate before attaining a genial, pre-civil-war-Beirut balance among its many ethnic and political factions. Morris' word-portraits of Hav's labyrinthine Medina, its precious snow raspberries, its grueling annual "roof race" and the official trumpeter who woke the locals every morning with a tune dating from the First Crusade made the place indelible...
...boasts that the rising circulation of his international affairs-oriented paper demonstrates changing Chinese attitudes to the outside world, especially America: "Chinese people are much more realistic about the United States, and that means their reactions are less extreme." But ask Hu about the Belgrade incident and his genial demeanor vanishes. Hu says he doesn't believe Washington's explanation that the attack was a mistake. His face flushed and his voice rising, he warns that such an incident "must never be allowed to happen again. Never. If it did, the reaction of the Chinese people would be much stronger...
...simultaneously. The question raised by The Notorious Bettie Page is whether that aperçu also applies to hearts. For Page, who in real life gained a dubious fame by posing for risibly risqué pictures back in the 1950s, is portrayed as both a sweet-souled religious fundamentalist and a genial exhibitionist. She seems to feel that the good Lord gave her an attractive body for the excellent reason that it pleasured men to ogle it in various states of undress...
...Contempt ricochets through quarters of the commentariat that have long given Bush the benefit of the doubt. Through the 2004 campaign, when Don Imus was a genial Kerry supporter, he often made the point that he thought Bush was a decent guy; Imus was no firebreathing Franken. But Wednesday morning Imus kept playing a clip from Bush's speech in Iowa in which he insisted that America's golden fields of corn would rescue us from the environmental and strategic misery of dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The President sounded, Imus said, "trailer-park stupid...