Word: insights
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...University of Houston, Jack Matson runs a course the students have nicknamed Failure 101. They are encouraged to build the tallest structure possible out of ice-cream-bar sticks, then to look for "the insight in every failure. Those who end up with the highest projects went through the most failures. Whoever followed a fixed idea from the outset never finished first...
...there is no longer a clear-cut Enemy at the Gates, a useful if more diffuse one can still be found at the bottom of the garden: a fairy. Such is the insight on which Jesse Helms is banking his political fortune in this Senate election year...
Sununu often discounts the intelligence of those who do not debate as ferociously as he. For all his brusque misjudgment of individuals, however, Sununu shows astute insight into groups. He cleverly divines which arguments will be most persuasive to which audiences. And though he is deeply conservative on social issues like abortion, Sununu is supple and ambitious enough to accommodate the raging moderation of George Bush...
Unlike those socialists depressed by the Reagan decade who retreated to their seminars on French deconstructionism, Ehrenreich went scrounging for morsels of social insight in chic restaurants, living rooms, corporate offices, Playboy magazines and even a make-believe White House Situation Room. She returns laughing -- at Ronald Reagan; at the American medical system, which would rather produce a "temple-sized ultraquark-powered graviton for the visualization of intestinal gas" than put up with sick people; and at the "unbearable being of whiteness," which led presidential candidate Richard Gephardt to tell "moving stories about his youth as a poor black...
...course, better in bed. Overall, her observations suffer from a simplistic yearning for a nonexistent era when the poor were not blamed for their poverty, when people did not cram their appointment books and when college graduates pursued ideals instead of salaries. For all her wit and sharp insight, Ehrenreich offers no guarantee that she won't turn up cranky for dinner...