Word: grimness
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McCracken is a novelist (The Giant's House), and Figment is the story of her pregnancy, her grieving and finally the birth of her second child, a baby boy, a year later. It is, as McCracken writes, "a story so grim and lessonless it's better not to think about at all." But reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion...
...Petro-economies once seemed impervious to the American sub-prime mortgage mess. That view is reflected in a grim joke making its way around Wall Street and the City of London about the options left for laid-off bankers: "It's Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai, or goodbye." But the reality may be even grimmer. In fact, Dubai and the other oil-enriched regions of the Arab world aren't quite the safe havens they once were. Western and Middle Eastern markets are more closely intertwined than they were during the 1970's oil boom. But recently, Arab exchanges have been...
What could be dismissed as just too grim is checked by the band's obvious sense of humanity. The hope-filled Geraldine at first seems like the recounting of good deeds by some spiritual guardian, until the chorus reveals, "I'll be the angel on your shoulder/ My name is Geraldine, I'm your social worker." Think R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts the first time you heard...
What does all this mean for would-be older dads? While women are used to seeing grim statistics about their decreasing chances of achieving pregnancy and the increasing risks of Down syndrome as they age, men have typically believed that they have all the time in the world. Perhaps now, men in their mid-30s will start sharing the same "now or never" pressure to conceive that women have long endured...
...transferred to video. The radio show has the tightest format around. It begins with "news from Iraq and life during wartime," has several five-minute sermons on topics of the day, allows only two segments for interviews with newsmakers and journalists. As a break from the gargle of grim death, she answers nonpolitical questions from listeners ("Ask Dr. Maddow"). And toward the show's end she veers into the weird and wacky. For months she has monitored reports of severed feet washing up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, and she's displayed nearly as magnificent an obsession with...