Word: pointless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Information Agency in the Kennedy Administration. Ann M. Sperber, a former book editor and freelance writer, has doggedly undertaken the task in Murrow: His Life and Times. Her volume is nothing if not inclusive: it mentions head colds and household accidents, and is replete with sometimes pointless anecdotes in which Murrow is at most a peripheral figure--half a page, for example, on how Correspondent David Schoenbrun's pregnant wife got out of bed at 7 a.m. to open the telegram offering him a job as CBS's Paris bureau chief. Perhaps Sperber felt obliged to empty her notebook simply...
...basic premises of James and his fellow sabermetricians (from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research) is that one-run strategies (including sacrifice bunts and stolen bases) are usually pointless. A corollary of this premise is that major league managers, with the exception of Earl Weaver and a few others, do not know what they are doing, a fact that makes anti-James feeling somewhat understandable. Baseball research is in its infancy, and much of it is slapdash. But the numbers suggest that the sabermetricians are on the right track and that baseball faces the galling prospect...
...which could have been a brilliant investigation of how crafty Harvard advertising perpetuates an image only incidentally related to reality, and of how fundraisers exhibit FBI-style skills in digging into their classmates' lives to appraise how much to bleed them for--is a flop. It opens with a pointless description of what three of Vigeland's classmates did after graduating, moves through a long account of a sappy conversation with Robert "Children of Crisis" Coles, describes in soporific detail the schedule for the 25th reunion and the differences between the Red, Green and Grape groups, and shamelessly repeats...
Most at home in his kitchen, Soltner starts work between 8 and 9 in the morning, checking on the ingredients delivered by suppliers. "It is pointless for me to go to market. Everything is too far apart in New York and, anyway, I would be a small purchaser, and so not get first choice. But my wholesalers are important purchasers and I am important to them, so I get the best of the best. If not, I call them fast -- like this," he said, phoning his fish wholesaler of 25 years to complain about a batch of less than fresh...
Such an attempt is inexcusable, but it is the inevitable consequence of pointless attempts to compare the suffering and experiences of minority groups--attempts that appear to be recurring, now in the case of Asian-Americans and Blacks. As academics like Takaki have pointed out, we can see the results of these attempts in current tension between Asian-Americans and Black communities on college campuses...