Word: masterful
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...psychology of the scam. "A lot of con men just want to please everyone," he says. He stresses that in a successful con game, appearances are everything. "After all," says Minkow, "fraud is nothing more than the skin of the truth stuffed with a lie." Spoken by the master himself...
...honest, Montesquieu's writing style has never helped his case for a wide readership. His dense, often confounding 1748 masterpiece The Spirit of the Laws can seem a ramshackle mansion, honeycombed with a floor plan impossible to master; Voltaire called it "a labyrinth without a thread." Likewise, while our Constitution opens with a stirring preamble, "We the people ...," it quickly settles into a tedious recitation of items, articles and sections, bulging in their seeming infinity like Harpo Marx's coat pockets, detailing all manner of governmental powers and functions--related to everything from dockyards to coinage. In fairness, how could...
...Carey arrives in Tokyo loaded with clever theories, his earnest questions already translated into Japanese. But he meets with frustration again and again. A visit with Yoshindo Yoshihara, one of the last swordsmiths working in Tokyo, is an exercise in polite disappointment, as the master deflects and deflates all questions, making it clear that the meaning of his craft, like the ability to handle his swords, can't cross cultural borders. "We would not know the etiquette, how to sit, how to hold the scabbard or the hilt, how to slide the blade out by the back surface only...
...Carey never gets Japan quite right, but his writer's eyes always appreciate what they see. Near the end of their trip, father and son luck into a meeting with filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. The language barrier, the cultural barrier, every barrier falls away as the delighted anim? master shows flip-books of his early work, the characters dancing with life on the corner of the page. "Thank God we had no language," muses Carey. "Thank God there were no questions to ask, just the privilege of sharing the joy of a great artist telling a story to an audience...
...Paltrow, Taye Diggs and Pierce Brosnan are snapping up styles such as the Vegan Mirage, right, for their comfort (the heels are slightly lower than the toes to promote a more natural posture). After a 20-year absence from the market, the shoes, originally developed by a Danish yoga master, are definitely making an impression...