Word: habitable
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This shared obsession is probably responsible for sustaining the relationship between Redford and Pakula through the strains that were to develop after shooting began. Pakula is a painstaking director, capable of talking out a scene for hours before putting it in front of the camera. Then his habit is to insist on endless retakes, covering every nuance his actors develop as they rework a scene, giving himself every imaginable option once he takes the film into the cutting room. Redford is an actor who does not find a character through ratiocination or conversation, but rather by getting as quickly...
...culture shock on their return to America or to Harvard. They say they are experts at adaptation, acting one way in America and another way abroad. To Holloway, who has never spent more than four years in any one place, Harvard seems like "just another assignment." It may be habit, an expression of chic, a youthful fixation or something wrong with American society that makes re-entry seems less than totally desirable to many. It may be significant that these particular students, many of whose parents are connected with government service, have these feelings about America. Or they may just...
Mayer, free-lance social critic and author of The Bankers and Madison Avenue, U.S.A., has a shrewd eye for the absurdities of government and other bureaucracies. In his view, lawyers and academics, starting in the 1960s, have fallen into the habit of legislating or planning outcomes in defiance of the actual world: "Nondiscrimination became equal opportunity became affirmative action became goals became quotas became equality of outcomes." He does not say at which link he would have interrupted the chain. Mayer does argue that government's tasks are to "harness greed," to lay a deft hand on the economic...
Thesis anxiety or not, if Eric Ambler's fifteen or so books were not so wildly interesting I could have kicked the habit. Agatha Christie, who has all the psychological insight of second year algebra, couldn't have maintained interest like that, and if you've ever tried Rex Stout you'd know after three of four books that Nero Wolfe is really just a fat old fart. Almost every collection of one-author-one-genre books gets repetitive after a while: critics betray this by calling thrillers a "craft" or a pulp writer a "masterful technician," generally revealing that...
...problem is that Rabin is an indifferent administrator with little interest in domestic politics or party affairs. He is introspective, impulsive and has a habit of making decisions, then afterward informing the people concerned. This may work in the army-Rabin served for four years as Israel's Chief of Staff-but not with Cabinet Ministers. Some of them have first heard of Rabin decisions affecting their departments on radio news broadcasts. Time and again he has announced a policy decision and then been forced by angry colleagues to retract or compromise...