Word: muted
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...entrance to the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a base for investigations of regional climate change, a rusting rocket is a mute reminder of the complex's earlier life as part of defenses against Soviet nuclear attack. That threat never materialized, and now, belatedly, scientists venture from the base to study a threat that has materialized but against which no adequate defense has been mounted. Despite the danger that climate change poses, the resources currently devoted to studying this problem--and combatting it--are inconsequential compared with the trillions spent during the cold war. Twenty years from now, we may wonder...
...Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina. Gone from the list of serious candidates are names like former Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell of Maine, who turns 67 this month, and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who will be 64 in November. Those political veterans would tend to mute the campaign's claim that the GOP ticket reflects the party's 'old guard' thinking." (Lede story leans toward Kerry...
...presidents framed the proceedings in a mute, touching way. George Bush the Elder acted the proud, mellow father in a non-speaking part. Ronald Reagan could not come to Philadelphia, for melancholy reasons. Gerald Ford had a stroke in the midst of the convention. Extinct volcanoes. One generation passeth away. George and Laura Bush made much of their daughters' going off to college, which is, so to speak, where the boomers came in and the movie began. So the generational cycle is, belatedly but convincingly, accomplished...
...takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script. In the Bruckheimer tradition, Memphis assembles a team to carry off the job: a father figure (Robert Duvall), the token black (Chi McBride) and a mute (Brit footballer Vinnie Jones) with a gift for setting cars on fire. Angelina Jolie is here as the nominal girl-jock love interest, but Memphis' true love is a Ford Mustang Shelby GT 500. As he says of his early career, "I didn't do it for the money...
Nathan Glazer, the Harvard sociologist, takes a different, less admiring view. "The mute memorial is all around us," writes Glazer in The Public Interest; and the most successful of them, the Vietnam Memorial, "does not tell us that [those killed] died for their country, or for liberty, or for democracy, or even that they died in vain. It says nothing except that they died." We may speak to the memorials, says Glazer, but they no longer speak clearly to us. Modern art has replaced excessive clarity with none...