Word: lowering
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Needless to say, Harvard is a much different place these days, when the only things our professors give us are lower participation grades and holier-than-thou frowns when our cell phones go off in class. Sigh...
...stop going to the movies. For the first time ever, the annual box-office total exceeded $10 billion ($10.5851, to get into pi calculations), outpacing the previous record, in 2008, by nearly 10%. The number of tickets sold, 1.474 billion, was the highest of the past five years - though lower than sales in any year from 2001 to 2004, when the big franchises (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Shrek, Harry Potter) were really cooking. Inflation explains the variance between dollars earned and tickets sold. Ticket prices keep rising; and with Avatar charging road-show fees...
...Afghanistan: Having proclaimed it "the right war" on the campaign trail, Obama initially sought to lower the benchmark of success to avoid nation-building or expansive counterinsurgency and instead focus narrowly on preventing al-Qaeda from restoring its presence there. But the commander he appointed to take charge of the war, General Stanley McChrystal, warned the White House last summer that the U.S. side was losing in Afghanistan and requested tens of thousands more troops to stop the Taliban's advance. After months of internal debate, Obama opted to send reinforcements, with the hopelessly optimistic caveat that they would begin...