Word: quirks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...With the race as tight as it is, Hagan's chances in the once reliably red state may boil down to voter education thanks to a quirk of state political history. In the '80s, the Democratic controlled legislature got tired of losing down ballot races thanks to weak presidential candidates and separated the ballots. On this year's ballot, therefore, voters have to vote twice-once for president and once for the Democrats from the state - rather than being able to make one single choice for the entire slate of Democratic candidates...
...chronicler of American lives, a former Incredible (the voice behind Violet's bangs) and the author of The Wordy Shipmates, out this month, which finds the quirk in America's Puritan heritage. Here's what's on Vowell's short list this fall...
...with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” The exchange is a comically morose take on the idea that genius is childhood recaptured at will; for Woody Allen, grown-up gloom is simply the mature form of a congenital quirk: existential thinking...
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...
...this point, those well acquainted with quirk will have already recognized the fell shadow of another quirky epistolary work looming over Guernsey (don't make me type out the whole title again): Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, in which an American book lover from the pre-Amazon era forms a transatlantic friendship with an English bookseller. Hanff's book is a work of Good Quirk, the very best. But it has been done. And there is every indication that Guernsey will devolve from here into a rote exercise in Anglophilia and cozy, self-congratulatory bibliomania...