Word: instinctiveness
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...knew that, sometimes, nothing looks so good on the giant Festival Palais screen as a bad Hollywood movie. In 1992 the Opening Night entry was Basic Instinct, that chicly sleazy sex-and-violence thriller starring Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone and the space between Sharon Stone's legs. U.S. critics had seen the movie months before, and dumped their contempt on it. Yet in the Lumiere Theatre at Cannes, on that 60-ft.-wide canvas, it had the kind of luminosity, confidence and throbbing pulse that no Franco-Polish minimalist masterpiece could match. This, we were reminded, is why audiences...
...plague of modernity has brought to our backbiting a new crudeness. We have eschewed toady gentility in favor of self-serving strife. And now the scoundrels bring us Risk, to rearrange that nasty competitive instinct along arbitrary House lines. The opening bell had hardly sounded before the color-coded trash-talk began. Those same horrid specimens who might otherwise have greedily withheld a study guide or sabotaged a classmate’s project instead spend their hours hijacking his account and sending his beloved soldiers to their doom. The effect is less severe, but the motive just as inglorious...
...safety valve for its government. Some in the U.S. Congress have suggested slapping a tax on those wire transfers as a way to make Mexico's negligent elite more serious about economic development and job creation. Such measures would simply end up hurting poor families and villages; but the instinct to leverage Mexican officialdom seems right. Punishing illegal immigrants might make Lou Dobbs feel good. But getting Latin America's fat cats to take care of their own people for a change is the better solution...
...atheist bootlegger who was born again when he was 19, Falwell initially followed the Baptist tradition of keeping church and state devoutly separate. (This instinct also reflected the fact that in his early days of ministry it was the clerics of the left who were flooding the streets and lobbying the Senate and speaking passionately from their pulpits in defense of civil rights.) But with the coming of the culture wars and especially the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Falwell had another conversion experience, and entered the political arena with a vengeance...
...people have been really nice to me...It’s still really surreal to me, to hear that anyone’s read it other than people that I’ve physically handed it to. Whenever I read any criticism of it, my first instinct is to think “where did I meet this person who somehow read my jokes...