Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Snooze-ville. A sharp editor would have axed it in favor of expanding some of the other stories that seem under-developed. "Cake," for example, about a disgruntled teacher who starts sharing urine-spiked cakes with his co-workers, strains to keep its head above the quicksand of the central sick joke. Only at the end does it start to get interesting when the teacher sits down with an attractive therapist. Then, abruptly, the story ends with his dismissal of her as, bizarrely, "a Freudian...
...relevant story but told through a man who morphs from insufferably confident hawk to insufferably righteous dove. Fortunately, Spader has built a career on making creepy soullessness intriguing. Ellsberg compares the quagmire to quicksand: it's the stalest cliche imaginable, yet Spader sells it with his bitter, weary delivery. Later, after a fact-finding trip to the front line, he says he learned "we couldn't win unless ..." He trails off, and in that moment you see his brashness silently shatter. There is no "unless...
...wondered what Americans saw in his long, deeply Anglophilic and, let's be frank, overwritten epic. But the Rings had struck a chord. The burgeoning environmental movement saw in his wasteland of Mordor a strip-mined industrial dystopia. On a deeper level, a country drowning in the moral quicksand of Vietnam and Watergate found comfort in the moral clarity of Tolkien's epic story of a just, clear war. Good and evil are fixed stars in the skies of Middle-earth even as they're starting to look wobbly in ours...
...after that, each month's bills can be paid in about 15 minutes. Van Dyke sees people who start out paying a couple of bills electronically and then add one or two a month until they're fully automated. "It's a good kind of quicksand," he says. "The more bills you pay, the more you want...
...taking a chance for peace that depends on Arafat, the President is acknowledging that the moral absolutism that has worked so well in the war against terror doesn't apply to every feud. The inside story of how Bush decided to wade waist-deep into the Middle East quicksand is the story of a President who is learning that there are few simple choices in foreign policy. So it is with Arafat. "He is a liar and completely untrustworthy," says an Administration official, "but for the moment...