Word: mindly
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Sometimes an inspirational clicks with millions of Mildreds. The word gets out that some little movie will leave audiences limp with emotion and gratitude. A bunch of these true-life uplifters (The Sound of Music, A Man for All Seasons, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Schindler's List, A Beautiful Mind) have won the Oscar for Best Picture, and many others (My Left Foot, Awakenings, Shine, Erin Brockovich, The Pianist, Seabiscuit) have been nominated. It may be that members of the Motion Picture Academy, on the whole far older than the average movie audience, recall when the inspirational was so popular...
...have as much on the line as Extraordinary Measures: life or death for the two ailing, adorable kids in the movie and for the thousands like them who will die before they're 10 if a treatment isn't found quick. Does the phrase emotional blackmail come to mind? In theory, an inspirational story about a child facing death by disease is no more or less manipulative than a thriller plot about a man who turns to revenge because his wife and kids were murdered. What matters is the tone: Does it pander to the situation or elevate...
...increased our understanding of the economy and its ebb and flow. It doesn't seem to have made us any better at predicting the future, though; perhaps that would be too much to ask. But what is troubling at a time like this, with the economy on everyone's mind, is how misleading many economic indicators can be about the present...
With that in mind, I asked a few of my favorite economic forecasters to name an indicator or two that I could afford to start ignoring. Three said they disregarded the index of leading indicators, originally devised at the Commerce Department but now compiled by the Conference Board, a business group. Forecasters want new hard data, and the index "consists entirely of already released information and the Conference Board's forecasts," says Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. (The leading-indicators index topped a similar survey by the Chicago Tribune in 2005, it turns out.) The monthly employment estimate...
...think if any student feels like they need a little bit of extra time, or if they change their mind, we try to be as flexible as possible,” he said. “We’re not out to bust anybody’s chops...