Word: matters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Randi is philosophical about these and other diehards, recognizing that their need to believe in the supernatural overwhelms their common sense. No matter what evidence of deception or fraud is presented, he concludes, "there will always be people who really don't want to know that there is no tooth fairy...
Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle...
Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between...
...parochial military interests. Indeed that is what they were doing. But that, of course, is what they are paid to do. In a relationship that is still rooted in the paradox of deterrence, the soldiers will have their say, including their veto over what the diplomats -- or, for that matter, the President and the General Secretary -- can accomplish at one meeting. Or four...
Just what to do with all this equipment and manpower was another matter. With little chance for enterprising scoops, the networks elbowed one another for minor coups. ABC noted that it was the first to transmit pictures from inside the Kremlin, and CBS landed an interview with former Moscow Party Chief Boris Yeltsin. CBS's Rather, meanwhile, was the only anchor to get a face-to- face encounter with Gorbachev. It came by chance when the CBS crew, shooting inside the Kremlin, spotted the Soviet leader's entourage. While CBS Executive David Buksbaum created a diversionary scene, Rather squeezed past...