Word: quaintness
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...eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world. Vaccines had done their work so well, in fact, that in the context of 21st century medicine, with its smart drugs and high-tech interventions, they seemed almost quaint and out of date, a kind of biomedical backwater...
...middle of Beijing's main thoroughfare to face down the convoy of tanks sent to crush the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Now people who make similarly "crazy" choi-ces are by and large dismissed as extremists, anachronisms or lunatics irrelevant to China's political development, or as quaint idealists tragically out of step with the progress of their nation. Ian Buruma's Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (Random House; 367 pages) deftly refutes this increasingly widespread belief, by subjecting the group he refers to as "China's awkward squad" to the same probing scrutiny...
Gorby. Glasnost. Perestroika. Those quaint, inseparable terms entered the global lexicon in the 1980s as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed a new glasnost (openness) in Soviet society and began implementing perestroika (restructuring) in its economy and politics. He sought a more conciliatory relationship with the U.S., negotiating arms reductions. With a Western-style politician's charm and homey touch, he became, as TIME put it, "a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union: more open, more concerned with the welfare of its citizens and less with the spread of its ideology and system abroad." What did spread...
...Williams and Billie Tsien were the perfect team for this vest-pocket New York City museum. Their famous feel for craft and material is something that folk artists understand. But their exercises in stone, glass and ingeniously textured metals are carried out within a modernist idiom that never looks quaint or "folkloric." Who knew you could work so many delightful configurations of space and surprising vistas--plus three staircases--into a relatively small building? It's a jewel-box museum that's a jewel in itself...
...Williams and Billie Tsien were the perfect team for this vest-pocket New York City museum. Their famous feel for craft and material is something that folk artists understand. But their exercises in stone, glass and ingeniously textured metals are carried out within a modernist idiom that never looks quaint or "folkloric." Who knew you could work so many delightful configurations of space and surprising vistas - plus three staircases - into a relatively small building? It's a jewel-box museum that's a jewel in itself...