Word: plucking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...myself. When I was young, my family attended religious services run by a woman named Grace, a brassy Italian-American lady whose ministry was based around her ability to (brace yourselves, my science-concentrating friends) heal people of various illnesses, ranging from chronic arthritis to cancer. She would pluck sufferers from the crowd, name their ailments, touch them—and they would fall over and lie twitching on the carpeted floor of whatever Connecticut high school auditorium her constantly cash-strapped organization had rented out that night. Sometimes they spoke in tongues. (Sometimes my parents did—which...
Rather than pluck out selected ballots and counting them entirely, fractional transfer would take all extra ballots but weight them as if each one was just a fraction of a vote. For example, instead of counting every 4th ballot, all of the ballots would be counted with a weight of one-fourth...
Just a day after the World Trade Center was flattened, tens of thousands of New Yorkers gamely hopped a train or a cab or walked to work as usual. What else were they going to do? Quit? Not likely. Similar pluck will mark the national economy. Sure, there will be economic tremors from the terrorist attacks. But the likely net effect--purely in economic terms--will be to hurry up and shorten a slowdown already in place and bring a quick end to the bear market that has gripped Wall Street since the Dow peaked in January...
...fact, White's willingness to be lucky--by which he meant pluck and hustle--is the American predisposition. Everyone (including us New Yorkers) tends to think of this place as radically unlike the rest of America. But now we know differently. Wide-open, vulnerable New York was targeted with such staggering precision and viciousness because the city, more than any other, actually does live up to the demonic Taliban caricature. We are the bin Ladenites' worst nightmare. We are rich. We swagger. We enjoy ourselves. From Wall Street to the media conglomerates of Midtown to the vast immigrant neighborhoods...
...assess, and fund, schools, the messiest question of all is disarmingly simple: What is a failing school? Given all the stories we hear of kids who don't have books - and wouldn't know how to read them if they did - it shouldn't be so difficult to pluck out the scores of schools that don't pass muster. But what about the thousands more where students may not all be excelling but where teachers work with the meagerest of resources and, with a little encouragement, just might turn the corner? In other words, how do you tell the really...