Word: impel
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...face it, while guilt may impel some celebrities to volunteer, guilt is a two-way street. We're the ones who buy the tickets and watch Entertainment Tonight. When I read in PEOPLE magazine about Jessica Simpson jetting to Africa to help kids with facial deformities ("They were in awe of the blond hair," she reported), sure, I laughed. She conveniently happened to turn from Daisy Duke into Florence Nightingale just as her impending split from husband Nick Lachey was dribbling into the tabloids. But then again, what was I doing to improve the lives of needy children in Africa...
...Kuwaiti parliament last week, a crowd gathered quickly, noisily, in one of those convulsions of public feeling that impel strangers to converge on a single spot. They were not there to protest. Dancing, singing and launching fireworks, some 300 men and women came to celebrate a breakthrough political victory. After a nine-hour parliamentary debate, and six long years of delay, a bill granting women the right to vote and to run for public office finally passed. "Our hearts are overflowing with joy and happiness," exulted Fayza al-Awadhi, a member of the Kuwaiti Women's Cultural & Social Society. Giving...
...conclusion: it does, and shockingly well, an impression that struck him one rainy day when he taught his nephew, 7, the video game SimCity and soon found the kid making suggestions about industrial tax rates. Video games, Johnson notes, impel us to learn because playing them means not just following rules but also discovering what the rules are. And these rules can be staggeringly complicated. Johnson unpacks the nested objectives of just one segment of a Zelda video game with enough detail to bury the canard that it is "passive" entertainment...
That said, Robinson nonetheless achieves the true purpose of criticism: to impel his reader to return to the music itself, and to hear it anew. --By Otto Friedrich
...communist nations were once so close that China sent troops to defend North Korea against the U.S. military. Now, Beijing appears to have stronger ties with capitalist America. In particular, China's leaders fear that a nuclear-armed North Korea could incite an arms race that would impel Japan and perhaps even Taiwan to build their own nukes. "We once thought Pyongyang was just trying to play a game in return for economic aid," says Zhu Feng, director of the International Security Program at Peking University, "but now we see it is very serious about its nuclear program...