Word: gist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gist:The great museums of the world are stuffed with spoils of war. They're crammed with stolen relics and permanently borrowed treasures, beautiful icons obtained through shady means and cultural riches that their countries of origin want back - right now. In her look at the debate over who owns ancient art, Waxman, a former Hollywood reporter for the New York Times profiles four museums - the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum - and poses the question, "Shall we empty [them] because one source country after another seeks the return of treasures...
...Gist: Today's schizophrenic may believe that terrorists are beaming radio transmissions into his brain; 50 years ago, however, Communists were the culprits. And a century ago, before radio was invented, it might have been a simple case of "hearing voices." In a paper published last spring, three Slovenian psychiatrists examined the ways in which insanity has historically manifested itself, and whether "crazy" has always been the same. Borut Skodlar, Mojca Dernovsek and Marga Kocmur studied 120 records of schizophrenic patients admitted to the Ljubljana (Slovenia) psychiatric hospital between 1881 and 2000 to see if psychotic delusions are affected...
...Gist:Of all of the assorted manners of creative expression - cinema, literature, dance, theater, music, architecture - visual art is the most inscrutable. It is swaddled in layers of pretension, seemingly produced, discussed, and traded by a rare, elite few. Yet, as Thornton argues, more people seem to be buying and consuming art than ever before. Structured as a series of seven day-long dips into the community's various subcultures, Thornton's book explores (among other things) the floating jealousies at a high-end auction, the exhausting, freewheeling process of an art school critique session, and the machinations behind...
...Gist: Over the last 40 years, film critic Roger Ebert has made a regular habit of championing independent films and little-known directors. And so it was in November of 1967 when, after being a film critic for only seven months, he went out on a limb to lavish praise on a first-time filmmaker by the name of Martin Scorsese - penning the first-ever writeup for this unknown New Yorker whose debut feature I Call First premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival...
...Gist: In a rare and personal report on the much-speculated-upon Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, former Delta Force commander Dalton Fury attempts to lay to rest the inconsistencies, inaccuracies and falsities which he says were perpetuated amid the hunt for Osama bin Laden in December 2001. Fury blames an "excitement-starved general public," a clueless intelligence community, an even more clueless press corps and the need to keep Delta Force operations classified for a misguided account of the operation that he calls "fantastic and exciting stuff, but utter hogwash...