Word: norms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...During my weeklong stay in Lahore, I was repeatedly alarmed by upper-class Pakistanis’ nonchalance and misplacement of priorities. Throughout my stay, I attended one opulent wedding (but heard about many more), replete with lavish decorations and a bejeweled bride. Such grandeur has increasingly become the norm; anything less is looked down upon. People seem to be spending millions on weddings—not out of joy, but out of a desire to one-up the last celebration they have attended...
Former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, former Obama presidential campaign senior advisor Stephanie Cutter, and Wall Street Journal columnist and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan headline the Institute of Politics' fall lineup of resident and visiting fellows announced Thursday...
...middle of what some scientists have begun to call the sixth great extinction event, this one caused almost entirely by human beings. Human expansion, hunting, deforestation and ultimately climate change are eliminating species at a rate up to 1,000 times higher than the evolutionary norm. Species like the Yangtze River dolphin and the golden toad have disappeared, while a range of animals - from the Sumatran tiger to the silky Sifaka lemur of Madagascar are on the brink...
Since then, eccentricity has become the norm. The characters might be two people who hate each other and thus are bound to fall in love, as in The Ugly Truth, or strangers with complementary needs, as in The Answer Man, or, for a change, folks who seem simpatico but have trouble becoming a couple, as in (500) Days of Summer. What the new films share is an aim to evoke familiar laughs and perhaps a climactic tear. That's the difference between an action movie and a comedy: the first makes you gasp, "I've never seen that before...
...medieval Sufi poet much cherished by New Age spiritualists. But there was nothing fringe or alternative about it. "In many places, Sufism was the way whole populations expressed their Muslim identity," says Faisal Devji, an expert on political Islam at Oxford University. "In South Asia, it was the norm...