Word: prosaic
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Sometimes the prosaic can be breathtaking. I am standing in the new showroom of a company that manufactures plumbing supplies in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Mansour Izgayer, one of three brothers who own the factory, is giving me a tour of his business and his life. He and his brothers were living in the U.S. when peace seemed to break out in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords. They decided to return home, as did many other members of the Palestinian diaspora. They built their company, Royal Industries & Trading, persistently, even after the prospects...
...third strand of thinking is more prosaic and might feel familiar to survivors of politics of the early 1990s. That too was an era of deep divisions and wildly swinging opinion polls: Obama's recent roller-coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that...
They met cute. In 1967, Smith was a dreamy 20-year-old from a blue collar family. She was obsessed with art, film and books, and her taste in decadent demigods was impeccable, from Charles Baudelaire to William Burroughs. But she was drifting into a prosaic life. The previous year she had gotten pregnant, dropped out of a teachers' college, placed the baby with an adoptive family and started punching a clock in a textbook factory. In desperation she lunged for New York City with her drawing pencils and a copy of Rimbaud. Straight off the bus she headed...
...privileges. Exceptionalism can be a dangerous faith because of how much it can extenuate and excuse. Gates is not a philosopher, and it is hard to know what he means by his profession of the exceptionalist faith. It may be just a fancy way of expressing the more prosaic pursuit of a great power's long-term strategic goals: the Cold War, the long war on terrorism, the escalation in Afghanistan...
...there is another story here, more prosaic but no less important to the future arc of global business and the global balance of power. Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu. But it isn't just that Google has struggled. All of the New Economy western companies in the media and information business have failed to establish themselves in China. Before Google, eBay and Yahoo both made investments of years and millions upon millions of dollars to tap the fast-growing Internet...