Word: retreater
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Executives at Lucent Technologies, the New Jersey telecom-equipment maker, couldn't help noticing this year that CEO Richard McGinn had morphed from an outgoing, hands-on boss who ate lunch in the cafeteria to a withdrawn figure bunkered in his office. Perhaps retreat was in order. After three otherwise successful years at the helm, McGinn had committed a series of screw-ups. Among them: missing out on optical-equipment investments that Lucent's competitors later cleaned up on and avoiding layoffs in spite of declining sales. Two weeks ago, he delivered really bad news: the current quarter's revenue...
Nobody talks about it. Nobody wants to. We are all complicit, and so we natter on about "privacy" and how looking at porn is "natural," and then we retreat to our private paradises where everything is normal, where no desire is questioned, no fetish forbidden. We go into the darkness, and the question that we should ask ourselves, as pornography takes up permanent residence in the basement of American life, is whether the darkness goes into...
...reality that is strange to them. To dispel the tension, I open with a discussion about Tolstoy's War and Peace, which describes the war of the Russian people against the invading Napoleon. Here in our small country we do not have the wide spaces that would allow a retreat from Moscow. The tension is broken, the audience listens to what I say, which is translated into Russian...
...final moment of clarity before I retreat into a cave and forever obsess about import versions of singles by the Jam, I shall try to name songs that I like that were fairly well-known: "Jumpin' Jumpin'" by Destiny's Child," "Shackles (Praise You)" by Mary Mary, "Thank You" by Dido, "Baby Did a Bad Thing" by Chris Isaak, "Porcelain" by Moby (I confess) and "Got Your Money" by Ol' Dirty Bastard (right). ODB IS ON THE LOOSE. ODB IS ON THE LOOSE. We interrupt this program to bring you this news. Wow. I always thought these things happened only...
...American diplomats worried privately before Camp David that Arafat hadn't prepared his people adequately for the tough choices he'd have to make. But they failed to grasp why he hadn't done so: Arafat arrived at the presidential retreat already having made far more concessions than Palestinians on the streets were ready to accept. "Clinton assumed that Arafat didn't have firmly felt positions, that his problems could be papered over," says Edward Abbington, a former State Department diplomat who now advises the Palestinians...