Word: pivots
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...French TV every Friday night, right after a dubbed version of Miami Vice, it is something of a national event. Some 6 million people tune in faithfully -- cab drivers as well as business executives, concierges as well as intellectuals. But even more remarkable than the lofty status of Bernard Pivot is the subject of his program: books...
...Pivot is host of Apostrophes, an urbane 90-minute discussion of literature and ideas with some of the world's most famous authors. Henry Kissinger has appeared, as have French Presidents Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. Most weeks, however, writers like Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag and others of lesser renown are the stars...
...talk show that is both highly rated and uncompromisingly literary would be dismissed by U.S. television executives as a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. But in France, intellectuals are often as celebrated as movie stars, even among nonreaders. In a recent survey of French viewers, 38% said Pivot was their favorite TV personality. (His closest competition: a German shepherd named Junior who is featured on a hit show about pets.) Nor is his popularity an exclusively French phenomenon. Apostrophes is also seen in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, French-speaking Africa, Poland and even on a cable channel in Manhattan...
...after another. His resignation last week gave Ronald Reagan the chance to tilt the court more sharply to the right, perhaps for decades, by appointing a more sternly and consistently conservative Justice. Said Paul Gewirtz, professor of law at Yale: "This is not just another vacancy. This is the pivot point in the next generation of American constitutional...
While they shuffle through the orderly single-file maze of the serving line, we twirl spastically from one tub to another, careening around arms and flailing scoops to finally smack cups onto the counter, then pivot to the register, ducking around cone-wielding scoopers. It's a sport more intricate than basketball, with the interesting complication that the other team is working with the wrong set of rules...