Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...acquaintance tells a good anecdote about the contrast between the American and the European educational philosophies. One year he noticed that a high school student in the summer school electronics course he was teaching was doing poorly, and he and the teaching fellow were discussing why this might be. Perhaps, they suggested, he was not really interested in the material and was attending summer school only because his parents had made him. Perhaps he was having trouble adapting to being so far from home. That year the co-instructor for the course happened to be a Greek engineer. When...
...qualms about embracing the rawest form of dog-eat-dog capitalism (including the only health care system in the world based entirely on private profit), and yet their unwillingness to label anyone as intrinsically less worthy and their commitment to "being nice" indicate a sense of compassion. Some might see a contradiction, but I think there's a logic behind it. Merciless selection seems less objectionable if we insist that no one is intrinsically unfit. The losers are victims of circumstance, who, in principle at least, can be helped to succeed...
...maintain that a large part of the population is condemned to failure from the outset would require a ruthlessness that Americans cannot muster except in jest (which might be why American comedy is largely about outrageous losers, like Kramer, Dilbert and Homer Simpson...
...does not help much in settling the issue: The United States is the wealthiest country and its top universities are generally acknowledged to be the best in the world. But many of its schools are downright awful and part of the reason for the success of the United States might be that so many foreign-trained experts (who usually turn out to be better qualified than the nationals) end up working here anyway...
...long-term adversaries in a variety of scenarios. Tit-for-tat arrests and expulsions, however, are the melodramatics of a past era. These days U.S. and Russian intelligence services actually work closely together on issues such as terrorism and money laundering, and a quiet word or a discreet expulsion might have sufficed if, indeed, there was espionage under way. But that would be to miss a domestic political opportunity. "The atmosphere in Russian politics is increasingly anti-Western," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "And you can generate political capital by saying ?Washington is up to its old tricks...