Word: masking
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...Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted. Her arsenal includes the occasional girlish giggle, a disarming smile and a sartorial penchant for pure white. To her opponents in the party, those are unfair tactics, ones that mask an ideological emptiness that will show up sooner or later. "Technique doesn't replace politics; there have to be ideas, convictions, a discussion of the stakes," said Lionel Jospin, who, you might have thought, would have had the decency to stay silent: Jospin was so disastrous a Socialist presidential candidate...
...Over in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit African-American neighborhoods, landlord Donald Thomas has much the same hope. A paper mask over his mouth, Thomas is using a crowbar to pull nails from the frame of the house he grew up in and now rents out. Unemployed since Katrina flooded the Hyatt and took his job as a banquet captain, he is spending his time renovating. The city is in dire need of rental housing like his, since Katrina destroyed some 43,000 units, including 5,000 public housing apartments. Standing in the doorway...
...Silas Lee, a Xavier University sociologist, has written that New Orleans has a "troubled soul" where racism and poverty hide behind a mask of serenity. White illustrates that reality with the story of a simple ritual he adopted when he sought haven in Houston with his elderly mother and aunt. Before Sunday dinner, they would take a drive and tour the city's schools. "My mother and aunt would end up in tears," White said, "even the worst of the Houston schools were ten times better than any in New Orleans...
...social manners that can be defined to make Iranians sound exquisitely polite or deceitful, depending on the point you're trying to make. At heart, it is a form of etiquette intended to harmonize social encounters, and involves displays of flattery and deference. Taarof does not seek to mask the truth, it simply rests on the belief that life is more pleasant when you do not needlessly inform every jerk you meet that he is indeed a jerk. What does this mean in practice? Say you go to meet the deputy foreign minister. You may not be certain...
...southern Mexico leaves plenty of time for literary pursuits. Zapatista spokesman SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS has co-written a noir mystery novel, The Uncomfortable Dead, with Spanish crime author Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The story of detectives investigating a government-backed murderer, due in U.S. bookstores next month, isn't the masked rebel's first stab at fiction. In 1999, Marcos, a former professor who travels with a pet rooster, wrote a children's book, Story of the Colors. His new work is an effort to raise awareness of the Zapatistas and cash for charity. Nice try. But he seems...