Word: last
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with a stalwart, creative dad who will somehow make things right. There's a similarly fruitful tension between the movie's hip, careless tone and the painstakingly retro stop-motion technique. The result is not a collision but a concerto and, for audiences, harmonic bliss. (Read "George Clooney: The Last Movie Star...
...when a person or persons unknown sowed three weeks of terror through random sniper fire. People were killed cutting grass, pumping gas, going shopping, walking to school. Death itself, with hood and scythe, could not have been more random, more remorseless, more unnerving. Or more pointless. When at last the snipers--John Allen Muhammad and his juvenile accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo--were caught, they had so little reason for murder that they hardly even tried to explain themselves. There was the older man's anger, the younger man's loneliness, a quarter-baked extortion plot. Late...
...work like a Dow Jones average of attitude. At least 1,000 people are surveyed daily, 350 days a year. (You can see how happy people are broken down by congressional district; Utah turns out to be the merriest state, West Virginia the glummest.) When the markets tanked last fall, happiness did too, and anyone who has lost his or her job, house or health care is probably still in a world of pain. But here's the funny thing: by this past summer, overall well-being was higher than it was in the summer of 2008, before the Apocalypse...
Some parts of raised expectations are plainly good. We expect to live well into our 80s because medicine keeps getting better. Many more high school students expect to go to college. In 1973, 47% of recent high school graduates attended college; last year 69% of new graduates enrolled. We expect our gadgets to get smaller and smarter, cooler and cheaper, because technology evolves exponentially, and at light speed. (See how to plan for retirement...
Carver had very mixed feelings about all that, especially when he saw the heavy changes Lish made to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's second volume of stories, published in 1981. At the last minute he even pleaded with Lish to withdraw the book, then relented, possibly because he felt that Lish was still the gatekeeper at fame's door. But Carver may also have sensed, and maybe even feared, that the darker register Lish summoned from those stories made his voice more distinctive and would secure his reputation--which it did. Before long, honors...