Word: modeste
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...population of the entire coast from Texas through Virginia. Like compulsive gamblers betting the mortgage, Americans have pressed their luck to the limit. There has been so much development on barrier islands and beaches along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, researchers say, that a hurricane of even modest intensity can cause a multibillion-dollar disaster. In Florida the value of insured coastal property rose from $566 billion in 1988 to $1 trillion in 1995. Consider Pinellas County, Fla. The last hurricane struck there in 1921, when the county had 28,000 people. Today Pinellas County has nearly 870,000 people...
...SLOSH analysis of New York City revealed that the sharp bend in the Atlantic coastline where New York and New Jersey meet, the New York Bight, would amplify the effects of a storm surge to the point where even a modest hurricane could generate deadly flooding in lower Manhattan. "That right angle, believe it or not, can cause 30 ft. of storm surge above normal tide conditions," says Donald Lewis, a hurricane-evacuation expert based in Miami who worked on the New York City study. "The same storm in other parts of the country might cause only...
...doubtful whether anyone is ever going to look back on William Sidney Mount (1807-68) as a great American painter; the charm of his work is too modest, its range of feeling too circumscribed, for that. And yet, as the show of his paintings, drawings and prints at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan (before traveling to Pittsburgh, Pa., and Fort Worth, Texas) makes clear, there were reasons for his popularity, and he has a special place, very much his own, in the making of American art. Why? Because, with the slightly younger George Caleb Bingham...
Genre means, broadly speaking, the depiction of manners, work, morals--of men and women as social creatures. It's inherently a modest art, unlike the other model to which painters aspired when Mount was growing up: the Grand Manner, the elevated form of historical or mythic narrative, full of heroes and demigods, pagan or biblical. The trouble was that the Grand Manner was scarcely attainable in 1830s America. Not even Thomas Cole, a considerably more gifted artist than Mount, had managed to do it without bathos. Benjamin West, the prodigy from Philadelphia, had brought it off--but by going...
Crowley the thrillmaker is modest in describing his calling: "I don't think I have a process," he says. "It's thinking on your feet differently for each show, moving forward rather than looking backwards. What I try not to do is repeat myself, because I get bored very quickly...