Word: peculiar
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Ricky is a disturbing presence. Prior to Littleton, he might have been dismissed as an improbable one. But that tragedy--created by kids held in contempt by their peers and able to conduct a criminal life free of parental interference--gives him a peculiar, if entirely coincidental, resonance. He is not, in the end, tragedy's primary victim, but he is its precipitator, and the instructor of the complacency that it is the business of this movie to shatter...
...money. In John le Carre's 1996 novel The Tailor of Panama, a Cockney living in Panama City tricks money out of British intelligence by stitching up a plot involving Asians' taking over the Panama Canal. In real-life Panama, the story is no less peculiar: a new President is about to be sworn in amid charges that the government has switched control of the canal to a company allegedly controlled by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The catfight over that is just a preview. The canal handover--the U.S. will pass the waterway over to Panama at noon...
That's yet to happen for New York City filmmakers Sam Sokolow and Rob Lobl, who--until last week, at least--lived in that peculiar purgatory of artists who made something critically acclaimed but commercially invisible. Then help came from an unlikely source: Amazon.com the burgeoning online book/CD/electronics/toy store and auction house, which just began a program to distribute indie films. Starting this week, people will be able to buy a videocassette of The Definite Maybe from Amazon for $14.95. "With movies, it used to be either you made it big or you ended up just showing it to your...
...might see anywhere in cubicle land. But in a warren of basement rooms under Princeton University's engineering quad, the meaning is more, well, meaningful. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, after all, explores how the human mind affects machines. Anomalies is the key word: something different, abnormal, peculiar or not easily classified. In this case, they are the elusive powers of consciousness. Can the emanations of the brain really make the copier malfunction? Or maybe turn on the lights or even cause airplanes to fall from the sky? And if the mind is capable of affecting sensitive machinery...
...there is only one again of that trio that faced a life so peculiar that only they could understand one another. "They rarely made a decision without checking with the other," said a board member of Harvard's Kennedy School. Jackie sheltered them from the garish glare. "I don't want my children to live here anymore," she said in anguish after Bobby's assassination, fearing America's violence. She was also wary of the immense pull of the hyperactive clan and the demons that came with it. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told Jackie at Caroline's wedding how striking...