Word: quirke
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...Susan Sontag were alive today, she would probably be hard at work on an essay. The essay would be called "Notes on Quirk," and it would be about Juno, Feist, Marisha Pessl, Napoleon Dynamite, Charlie Kaufman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bridget Jones, Nick Hornby and roughly 71% of all bloggers. The essay would analyze--lovingly, pitilessly--that category of entertainment that celebrates people who are lonely, misunderstood and defiantly eccentric but who, we're supposed to understand, are secretly cooler than everybody else, if only they knew it. Sontag would locate the elusive line that separates Bad Quirk--annoying, self-satisfied idiosyncrasy...
When you pick up a book titled The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Dial; 277 pages) by Mary Ann Shaffer and (and!) Annie Barrows, you know you're in for some quirk. It's just not immediately clear which kind. The book's heroine is a single woman in her early 30s. Her name is Juliet Ashton, and she is a journalist. The year is 1946. Juliet lives in London, a city from which the pall of World War II has not yet lifted. The rubble is still being cleared, the dead identified, the delicacies rationed...
...longer something that gets marked on your record. So colleges don't know if you had twice the time to take your SATs. That's why parents find it so highly desirable. But in the course of doing it, they have their kids tested to find some little quirk, some little vulnerability? And that's a measure of parental anxiety. And the parental anxiety is willing to put a negative label on kids. That's really something very new. You don't boast your strengths. You boast your weaknesses...
...Philadelphia high school, science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is yanked out of class to be told, along with the other teachers, about the events in New York City. No one's certain if it's a terrorist attack or a random quirk of nature, but "some kind of airborne chemical toxin" is spreading across the Northeast that's making people kill themselves. The pupils are sent home, and Elliot decides that he, his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and his math-teacher buddy (John Leguizamo) will get out of town. The movie is the story of their flight...
...Deathday Wishes Nancy Gibbs' eloquence on the death of her father left me breathless [May 5]. Yet the concept of a Deathday is not merely a quirk of J.K. Rowling's literature: Jewish culture has celebrated the Yahrzeit for centuries. It is a day of joyous yet sorrowful memory of those gone, during which people gather to support the bereaved with sweet recollections of the dead. My grandfather died when I was 7. Every year his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren partake of a meal in his name, those who remember him speaking of him to those...