Word: main
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...your main characters, Perkus Tooth, is this oddball recluse, a pop-culture savant obsessed with Marlon Brando and cult movies. What is it about American pop culture that makes it so easy for us to become obsessed with it? I guess for me, it stands in for the information surrounding us that we're trying to make sense of, including our own behavior, our own culture, other people's lives. With people like Perkus - the most exaggerated collectors or self-appointed experts - there's a poignancy to it. I love that kind of behavior, and I guess I'm guilty...
Increasing species numbers, however, may not be possible. The main hurdle, not surprisingly, is politics. The needs of a real conservation effort may require a level of animal protection beyond what is politically possible. That puts conservationists in a bind. Do they push for the tighter levels of protection that might successfully preserve endangered species or do they accept what is politically feasible? "We suggest that most vulnerable species are not really being managed for viability," writes Traill. "Rather, conservation targets in most cases merely aim to maximize short-term [species] persistence and fit with complex political and financial realities...
...factors will require leadership that the head of the U.N. mission has yet to demonstrate. If Karzai emerges the winner of the rushed and incomplete audit process now under way, Afghanistan's internal peace will depend on Karzai's opponents accepting - or at least tolerating - the outcome. Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, has said publicly that he does not believe the U.N.'s envoy is neutral. By failing to address the obvious fraud in Afghanistan's elections, the U.N. has lost credibility that is desperately needed for it to act as a postelection peacemaker...
...Review writer and self-described "conservative gloominary" leads readers on a bleak tour of modern life, bemoaning the state of our society and culture (the '00s are the first decade without a living novelist featured on TIME's cover, he laments). Derbyshire's no fan of liberalism, but his main targets are the utopian fantasies of both parties and the notion that humanity can patch the flaws that led us to this woeful state to begin with. Embracing hard truths would better prepare us for the real world, he writes--and might have helped us avoid the mortgage meltdown...
...Administration's lead health-care official, Joshua DuBois, head of the White House faith-based office, and John Carr, executive director of the USCCB's Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development. Both sides characterize the encounter as cordial and felt there was room for agreement on the main Catholic priorities: providing conscience protections for health-care workers and institutions that object to abortion; guaranteeing that abortion coverage was not mandated; and preventing federal funding of abortion...