Word: hardding
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...function of celebrity is to alert the rest of us to hard truths, to teach us the lessons of love and grief. Among these is the cruelest jest of fate: a child's death that precedes his or her parents'. That instructive obscenity slammed home today with the death of Natasha Richardson, a distinguished British actress who was a third-generation star of the noted Redgrave acting clan and the eldest daughter of the great and controversial Vanessa Redgrave. Richardson died two days after a seemingly unremarkable fall while skiing in Quebec. She lost consciousness and within 24 hours...
Read TIME's 1998 cover story on the future of hard currency...
...more capital. It might appease our restless animal spirits for a time; biologists have found that receiving an apology affects blood chemistry, slows the heart rate and calms our breathing - all much needed at a moment of national fibrillation. Chimpanzees apologize, or at least perform "reconciliation protocols." How hard can this be? (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...Plenty hard, it seems, since somewhere in the course of our fin de siècle excess, we corrupted the culture of contrition as well. Public apologies now play like vaudeville: the extravagant remorse of disgraced televangelists, the snarled "I'm sorry" of celebrities who exude regret at being caught rather than being wrong, the artful admissions of politicians who want credit for their confessions without any actual cost. We've learned to peel them apart with tweezers, find the insincerity and self-interest: If I caused any offense (you thin-skinned morons), I regret it. And so apologies...
...hard to avoid the conclusion that some of these men - and they are almost all men - belong in jail. But most were too shrewd to cross legal lines; they just danced along them, lingering in the loopholes, playing us for suckers. Now the damage is done, and it's easy enough for them to hide in the complexity of a system few of us understand - a system created by collective irresponsibility. But recklessness is a form of intent, and when the damage is measured in families disfigured by a sudden fear of the future, and parents haunted by the debts...