Word: milieu
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Balancing Act. Many of the experts doubt that Kosygin, a somewhat shy and aloof technician on the fringes of the party milieu, has the personality-or perhaps the ambition-to take charge alone. But as one observer puts it, "Russia is a dictatorship without a dictator now," and the feeling persists that the team system cannot work indefinitely. The old conflicts between the metal-eaters and the goulash-givers surely remain, and the military is hardly likely to be ecstatic over the shorter shrift it seems to be getting these days. But such power struggles as may be taking place...
...Those who love to see the tumbrels of social protest roll portentously across the stage will be sorely disappointed. The play also has one positive virtue: Baldwin's autobiographical acquaintance with the Negro evangelical scene. But Amen Corner, a 14-year-old first play, scuttles edgewise through this milieu like a crab, evading dramatic life more successfully than it confronts its characters. Baldwin has yet to learn that drama is really a verb masquerading as a noun...
...ranging from the systems engineers at the top down to the machine operators, have made a pampered and all but adored child of the computer. Not content with having it perform wondrous feats in space and on earth, they are constantly trying to extend its capabilities. In the experimental milieu they have created, they have taught computers to play ticktacktoe, blackjack, checkers and a passable game of chess, instructed it to compose avant-garde music (the Illiac Suite at the University of Illinois), write simple TV westerns and whodunits, and even try its hand at beatnik poetry. Example...
...Morning. More than familiar to U.S. film and playgoers nowadays is middleclass, industrial England: the rows on rows of red brick prison houses, the suffocating parochialism, the intellectual sterility, the emotional desiccation, the measuring out of life in tepid teacups, the apotheosis of fornication as the only salvation. The milieu has become predictable and precariously close to a bore. One knows not only what one will meet in such a house but who the residents will be. The father will be a petty tyrant who punctuates every sentence with the word bloody. The mother will be a crushed drab...
...faces of a hundred or so ambassadors by rote to making sure to seat Greeks and Turks at separate tables to remembering that the chargé d'affaires of the smallest principality outranks a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) but also to find her way in an unfamiliar milieu that demanded every ounce of charm she possessed. Luckily, Mrs. Hand has charm on tap. Her first time out (at the annual diplomatic reception given last week by the Secretary of State), she won raves. "Robin Duke was smashing," reported one observer, "but Mrs. Hand is cuddly...