Word: grandness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Under Putin, attitudes have flipped. Now it's the intellectuals who are disgusted with his administration's habitual disregard for democracy, its tendency to harass opposition figures and intimidate media outlets that dare to criticize the state. Average Russians, on the other hand, seem mostly to accept Putin's grand bargain: I'll improve your standard of living if you keep your mouth shut. It's similar to the deal that Deng Xiaoping and his successors have offered the Chinese: there will be no democracy, but if you behave, we will give you opportunities to get wealthy...
...swings between humor and pathos ended that evening at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, an ornate, three-tier orchestra hall whose stage had recently been fitted with a new acoustic shell to make the venue worthy of the New York Philharmonic. About 1,400 people jammed the hall--a few dozen foreign diplomats and business people, the rest North Koreans. When Maazel took the podium, it quickly became clear that the evening would be one of emotion. North Korean and U.S. flags stood at either end of the stage, and the audience rose as both nations' anthems were played...
...hard as the government tried to prevent it, little bits of reality kept seeping out from behind the curtain. At the Grand People's Study House, a sort of public library that conducts free classes in a variety of subjects, a colleague accidentally opened a door and found herself in a classroom that was dimly lit and at least 15°F (8°C) colder than the ones we had been shown. Some of the students wore winter jackets and hats. Earlier that morning, a member of the orchestra arrived late for a lavish breakfast buffet and found a couple...
Banks writes space opera on the grand scale: he measures time in eons, space in light-years, tragedies in gigadeaths. His human players strut and fret on that vast stage, struggling to retain a sense of purpose. "Welcome to the future," thinks Djan Seriy bitterly. "All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness." She could just as well have said, "Welcome to the present...
...served on multiple documentary juries at festivals including Sundance. His documentary, “The Same River Twice,” which revisits the lives of five friends who served as subjects for an earlier film (“River Dogs”) in which they journeyed to the Grand Canyon, premiered at Sundance in 2003. Galison is a professor in the History of Science department at Harvard and focuses in modern physics. His documentary “The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma” premiered on the History Channel in 2000. Galison’s research...