Word: raptness
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...feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention...
...Second Amendment case. Heller, who wore a Supreme Court tie and a blue baseball cap with a miniature silver pistol on it, looked like just another enthusiast as he handed out newsletters. But as he lectured me and my friends on the history of the case, we responded with rapt attention rather than casual interest. Heller, a security guard from Washington D.C., was the eponymous plaintiff in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller...
...career as an audience-convulsing lecturer that grew out of that first small triumph, Twain would become, as Powers puts it, "the nation's first rock star." We know his voice only from written descriptions of it. It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort...
...Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004. On the campaign trail Clinton often got wonky; in Pennsylvania a staffer remarked to me that, though boring to reporters, this was the secret to her success with the middle class. Indeed, audiences, especially those who were economically depressed, paid rapt attention to her lists of proposed legislative acts. In leaving the race, Clinton left the lists at home and her rhetoric soared as high as any Obama speech, at times rousing the crowd and then quieting them down during poetic and poignant moments...
...most rapt expression of the Pope's enthusiasm for the U.S. came in a high-minded 2004 dialogue with the president of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, published as the book Without Roots. It bemoans the European Union's refusal to acknowledge Christianity in a draft constitution, and Pera wonders about bringing back some kind of multidenominational "Christian civil religion." In response, Ratzinger cites Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and makes the case that America's Founding Fathers were pious men of different denominations who wrote the First Amendment prohibiting state establishment (that is, sponsorship) of religion precisely...