Word: needs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when Clinton went public in isolating Beijing earlier this month, it was clear the diplomatic game had changed, and not in China's favor. Beijing had always had a partner in pushing back against the West's desire for tough sanctions against Iran: Moscow. The Russians don't need Tehran's oil and gas, but they have significant economic interests in Iran, and Vladimir Putin, much more than Hu Jintao & Co., had very much been in the business of sticking a thumb in the eye of the U.S. whenever he could (the default position of pretty much...
...Perry's out to have fun too. He regularly steps out of character to ad-lib - chastising latecomers in the audience ("The show starts at 8. You move a little slower, you need to leave a little earlier"), joking about a co-star's bad breath and delivering impromptu movie reviews. (He praises Disney's The Princess and the Frog for having a black heroine but laments that she doesn't wind up with a black prince: "Black woman can't even have a black man in animation!") After the curtain call, he spends another 15 minutes talking...
...crude, commercial - and effective. Perry has tapped into his audience's shared experiences, hopes and worries, the need for a little escape, a little realism and a few moral lessons. I'm not part of his target audience - just as, I imagine, most of Perry's fans can't relate much to the glib, angst-ridden, upper-middle-class white professionals who populate so many of the plays that New York critics write encomiums to. But the crowd leaves Perry's show on a communal high. All Noel Coward gave me was a Champagne hangover...
Like the tetragrammatic name of God, the moniker Jwoww has encoded in it everything you need to understand the world we live in today. The idea that an unknown 23-year-old from Long Island would come equipped with a tabloid-ready exclamatory nickname, like J. Lo or P. Diddy, might, in a more self-effacing era, have seemed presumptuous. Now it's just commonsense branding. If you might be on a reality show, you may as well have a name that pops and precedes you like a well-positioned set of silicone implants. (Oh, also: you should...
...take capital [voluntarily]. That made it easier for many other banks to do so. In a crisis, we have what some people term the tallest-midget syndrome. Bankers don't want to be perceived as being weak, so they say, "I'm healthy, I'm strong, I don't need it" - right up until they...