Word: plain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What the stories of Franklin and Dickens have in common is the issue of wanting. Under what circumstances do men and women give in to forbidden desires - Dickens, a man starving for love, and Franklin, a man just plain starving? "We all have appetites and desires," Dickens says, "but only the savage agrees to sate them." The revelation that the stuffy Victorians had desires and acted on them isn't a particularly shocking one (nor would it have shocked an actual Victorian). But Flanagan makes the matter more interesting by posing it in the form of an insoluble dilemma: Which...
...October 4, 1957, a lonely rocket climbed skyward, slipped those so-called “surly bonds of earth,” and left the desolate Kazakh plain behind. That rocket carried Sputnik, the first satellite launched into space, and the simple beeping signal it beamed back to Earth reverberated through radio receivers into the most distant halls of power, marking the beginning of the space race and sending U.S. policy makers scrambling to close the gap between the United States and Soviet Russia.Consequences of the Soviet launch would not, however, stay within Washington—the resulting effort...
...good for Terminator Salvation, which lost a steep 62% from last weekend's gross. This fourth episode in the John Connor saga could trace the sorry trajectory of this March's action film, Watchmen, which earned more than half its total domestic take in its first weekend. In plain English, that means the hard-core fans saw it immediately but didn't go back or convince others to buy tickets. It also suggests that certain action franchises do need a star. Given the tarnished fiscal state of the Golden State, Arnold Schwarzenegger may wish he were a movie star again...
...moderate or just plain pragmatic Republicans are worried about putting off Hispanics, they are also under enormous pressure from conservative activist groups - Rush Limbaugh called Sotomayor and Obama "reverse racists" - to not let her go through without a real fight. "President Obama carried through on his threat to nominate a Justice who would indulge her policy preferences and biases on the bench," says Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a group opposing Sotomayor's candidacy. "I'm going to continue to do all I can to expose Sotomayor's view of judging...
...needs. For the high-functioning, such assisted-living situations are a better alternative than institutionalization; for the low-functioning, the concept is often better than the reality. What happens if the supported-living home we find for Noah goes belly-up or loses its license or is just plain corrupt? Then where would Noah go? My parents simply can't care for him at home, nor could...