Word: momentous
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...1990s - is entrusted with a $20,000 investment portfolio, and by seventh grade, kids are deciding what to buy and sell (profits help pay for college). Last year, for the first time, the eighth-grade class graduated with less than the original $20,000. Talk about a teachable moment: stocks don't always go up. (See the 25 best back-to-school gadgets...
Here's the moment when Joshua Ferris' new novel upshifts from good to great. The Unnamed is a novel about a marriage - hang on, that's not the moment - in which the husband Tim, a high-powered lawyer, is cursed with a bizarre affliction: every once in a while, without warning, he starts to walk compulsively, and he can't stop until he falls down from exhaustion. He and his wife Jane have tried dozens of cures, but nothing works. Then, a quarter of the way through the book, they get a letter from a famous neurologist, an Oliver Sacks...
...high cheekbones leading to a small, voluptuous mouth that could be sullen or amused. Her attitude promised a challenge to any man who would seek to love or tame her. That's clear in the 1946 Great Expectations, where her Estella calls Pip a "coarse little monster" at one moment and says, "You may kiss me if you like" the next. She steals Pip's heart, and breaks it, with the same cool smile...
...Brooks, whom she married after divorcing Granger. She took a couple years off when they had a daughter, Kate (she and Granger had a son, Tracy - both children named in honor of Simmons' friends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn); and when she was ready to return to films, her moment had passed. Her enduring glamour, and the tang she put into every line of dialogue, would have made her a welcome presence in sophisticated comedies, but nobody was writing them. Not yet 35, she had become the Older Woman in a town where that label defined an endangered species...
...seems like a stretch that the Census would have such grand influence, take a moment for a little history. The first Census, in 1790, explicitly asked about only one race: white. Blacks, for the most part, fell into the slave category. Race was about civil status. In the 19th century, concerns about keeping the white race pure led to the addition of the "mulatto" category in 1850 (and "quadroon" and "octoroon" in 1890), a process traced by Harvard political scientist Melissa Nobles in her book Shades of Citizenship. With rising immigration, Chinese and Japanese were added as categories...