Word: mannerize
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Clearly the comment refers to actions of "policy" taken by the government: the quotas required by affirmative action. But its phrasing also casts the problems facing minorities in a narrow, even paternalistic manner. It says that U.S. society will acknowledge a minority's problems only if they require policy amounting to obvious "special treatment." Just who delivers the treatment remains tantalizingly vague...
...sure, some scientists reluctantly allow that Rifkin does ask important questions about the ethical, economic and social implications of the new technologies, as indeed he does. The problem is that Rifkin frequently presents his case in such a shrill and occasionally unscrupulous manner that in the debates he hopes to encourage, fear and anger frequently replace information and reasoned judgment. As a result, the message is too easily discarded with the messenger. Says W. French Anderson, a gene-therapy researcher at the National Institutes of Health (and a Rifkin target): "In private, he and I agree almost exactly. The difference...
Rifkin, who has no real science background, has been deeply distrustful of scientists since he visited Dachau in the late 1960s. "The Nazis could have just slaughtered people, but look at the manner in which they did it," he says. "It was detached, rational. It was scientific. The Holocaust represents the dark side of the modern...
Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature...
...longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop...