Word: magics
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First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again...
That brings us to a truism about online video: it rewards brevity and scatters attention. That's true to an extent. Five to seven minutes seem to be the sweet spot for a webisode; "Baby Panda Sneezes" loses its magic after about 11 seconds. But a funny thing happened in my cable-free week: I found myself paying closer attention to the TV shows I watched online...
...world around us. In "Paraguay," for example, he employs the language of industrial production as art criticism: "Sheet art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown in color. Bulk art is air-dried, and changes color in particular historical epochs." (Barthelme quotes lose some of their magic out of context, like a colorful shell removed from a tide pool.) In Snow White--to which the New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue in 1967--the heroine sighs, "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear...
...away / I’m working on a dream / And our love will make it real someday.” Throughout the album, Springsteen largely alternates between getting his rock on and slowing down for a softer feel. Like on Springsteen’s previous album “Magic,” the E Street Band is much more prevalent and fleshes out the songs, giving them an epic quality, like on the dark and eight-minute long opener “Outlaw Pete,” a harrowing western tale about a man unable to escape his past...
...this album, save one, heavily incorporates a synthesizer and electronic elements. “Ulysses” and “No You Girls” manage to stay true to the old Franz Ferdinand aesthetic while adding these newer elements. That said, they fail to replicate the magic of their most popular single, “Take Me Out.” The album goes wrong when they depart almost completely from their template, evident in “Lucid Dreams.” The song clocks in at nearly 8 minutes and much of that...