Word: masterful
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...always appeared to me that deeply religious people use their faith to explain away the horrors and inequities of the human experience. Believing that everything is part of God's master plan affords them the complacency of accepting the most terrible of tragedies. It is with the deepest respect that I read about the struggle of the real Mother Teresa, who, it now appears, had no such crutch. This was a person who soldiered on because she was a good and caring human helping her fellow man endure senseless suffering. If there is a God, Teresa is sitting...
...section, now in its 20th year, championed prime work from Tsui Hark, the Hong Kong action master. The gaudily talented, impossibly prolific Takashi Miike got his start here and soon became a Madness regular. One of the highlights of TIFF 2007 is Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a shotgun-vs.-sword sagebrush pastiche in which all the actors speak phonetic English - except for Quentin Tarantino, in a succulent cameo role...
...always appeared to me that deeply religious people use their faith to explain away the horrors and inequities of the human experience. Believing that everything is part of God's master plan affords them the complacency of accepting the most terrible of tragedies. It is with the deepest respect that I read about the struggle of the real Mother Teresa, who, it now appears, had no such crutch. This was a person who soldiered on because she was a good and caring human helping her fellow man endure senseless suffering. If there is a God, Teresa is sitting...
...view of human nature in The Prince. People are so "ungrateful, fickle, [and] false," he wrote, that a ruler should comfortably abandon conventional morality in dealing with them. He should slay deposed rulers and their families, recognize that friendship "yields nothing," and, beneath a veneer of compassion and honesty, master treachery and deceit. In short, because man is evil, leaders must know "how to do evil...
Such cold-hearted prescriptions have shaped Machiavelli's reputation as the grand master of brutal pragmatism. But they reveal surprisingly little about the man himself - a statesman, poet, playwright and Florentine patriot who lived from 1469 to 1527. In his highly readable new biography, Machiavelli, Ross King paints a more complete picture of Florence's most misunderstood thinker and his tumultuous times. King's breezy narrative doesn't spare Machiavelli, depicting him as an intellectual who loved prostitutes as much as philosophy. But it does present the fresh and sympathetic hypothesis that Machiavelli may not, in fact, have been...