Word: reckoner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Enter Julia Roberts, bearing an Oscar. In this free-market free-for-all, she epitomizes the paradox of being the best. Is Roberts the best American actress? That little statue is a sign that she can sometimes be a screen presence to reckon with, but in any ballot of the most accomplished performers, she would meet heavy competition from Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore and Kathy Bates, to name a few. But Best Movie Star? No contest. And that's because she is the biggest female box-office draw, even in films that are often of so-so quality...
...Changoiwalas are not alone. This past March, India's markets crashed, knocking 16% off the national stock index. Investors across the country were rattled, and Calcutta was rocked to the bone. Daily volume on the city's exchange plunged by more than 80% and has yet to recover. Officials reckon that 400 of the bourse's 450 active brokers are near bankruptcy. And most of them are no longer showing up at the office. The Calcutta Stock Exchange, India's third- largest and one of the most venerable in Asia, looks like some backwater bus depot, rather than the bustling...
...harm's way with a gravitational slingshot, a trick long used to boost the speed of planetary probes. Earth would be the spacecraft, grabbing orbital energy from a passing asteroid. That would increase Earth's speed and enlarge its orbit. Repeated every few thousand years, Korycansky & Co. reckon, such flybys could stretch Earth's habitable lifetime by billions of years...
...what about that written work? Ellis' wildly popular Pulitzer prizewinning Founding Brothers, now in its 15th printing, has made him one of the most widely read historians not named Stephen Ambrose. Having cultivated a thriving general readership, he must now reckon with legitimate questions about whether his truth bending extended to his scholarship. Ashbel Green, Ellis' editor at Knopf, says the publishing house supports him and will work with him in the future. "I know these things aren't easy to compartmentalize," says Green, "but no one has questioned his scholarship in any of the books he has written...
Against that dreary background of official hubris, myopia and duplicity, it seems odd that former Senator Bob Kerrey is hitting newspaper headlines and television screens because of the revelation that his team of Navy SEALs killed innocent women and children while on a mission in the Mekong Delta. I reckon that thousands of grunts went through the same experience. But if what they did was appalling, it was comprehensible. In a way, they were victims of the machine that vaulted them into a hot, humid, shadowy, alien environment in which friend and foe were a blur, and all a potential...