Word: half
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China has been on an unconventional and unexpected journey that began after the tragedy of Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. The U.S., after half a century of global economic dominance, finds itself at a crossroads, unable to generate the growth that so many Americans expect and the services so many need, and still struggling to revitalize an economy that for so many years was the envy of the world. The U.S. has been accumulating debt and owes about $800 billion to China alone; China has been building reserves and now has in excess of $2.2 trillion. China remains a poorer...
...they're Nabokov's shards and no one else's: the "nasty compassion" the partygoers direct at a drunken Flora; the "alien creams" Flora spots in someone else's bathroom (recalling the "solemn pool of alien urine" deposited by Mr. Taxovich in another bathroom in Lolita); the playful half-rhyme of belie and belly; the perhaps overly wink-winky inclusion of a pedophile named Mr. Hubert H. Hubert; and one lost, evocative phrase off by itself in the upper margin of a card, without a context--"the orange awnings of southern summers...
...Original of Laura is a fragment, or a collection of fragments--"the novel was probably half or one-third 'written' in the strictly technical sense," Dmitri says. It is not a series of consecutive chapters. Nabokov liked to attack his subjects on multiple fronts, from all directions, an approach facilitated by his use of index cards. The book begins at a party attended by a woman named Flora. Her husband is not present, and she slips away to an absentminded tryst with a lover, which Nabokov renders delicately but unsentimentally: "That first surrender of hers was a little sudden...
...Original of Laura is a beautiful ruin, like the Venus de Milo, not a novel. To pretend otherwise is wishful thinking, no different from Philip's belief that he can master death. At some moments the book seems to anticipate its shattered future--Nabokov compares Flora to "an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book." That's part of her appeal and, oddly, part of Laura's too. You admire what you can see, and you dream about what might have been...
...military service members on combat tours - about 300,000 so far - returns home with symptoms of PTSD or major depression. "Anyone who goes through multiple deployments is going to be affected," says Dr. Matthew Friedman, director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' National Center for PTSD. But nearly half of these cases, according to the Rand study, go untreated because of the stigma that the military and civil society attach to mental disorders. The suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, counseled returning vets with PTSD, though there is no proof that this work unleashed...