Word: savant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Anxious to be on the right side of the bars, his readers joined the tirade. The newspaperman was elevated to social arbiter, literary critic and political savant. Even today, 22 years after his death, Mencken is remembered as the Sage of Baltimore, a pantheon figure in American letters. It is time for someone else to play the iconoclast. Charles Fecher, himself a Baltimore journalist, performs the task unwittingly in his amusing literary biography, Mencken: A Study of His Thought...
...menu-men are riding the wave of the so-called nouvelle cuisine, a form of culinary revisionism that has modified and simplified the classic, cholesterol-laden dishes of Caréme and Escoffier. It is not in fact all that nouvelle. Some 2,000 years ago, the Greek savant Arches-tratus inveighed against "sticky, clammy sauces." There is also cuisine minceur, the cooking of slimness. Michel Guérard, its chef-evangelist, has won a wider following for his ascetic unsauced dishes among dieters than among true gourmands, however...
Salinger's transition from prankster on the Potomac to savant on the Seine was a while in the making. After Kennedy was assassinated, Salinger lost election to a Senate seat from California; bounced around a few uncongenial executive suites in the U.S., England and France; and helped manage George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. After that debacle, he fled to France, jobless. Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber immediately hired him for L'Express in 1973, shortly before the Watergate story broke. Salinger's ability to make that long and intricate crisis comprehensible to a nation...
...once the world's largest public college for women. He wore many hats, editing the progressive Catholic weekly Commonweal for twelve years, working for UNESCO, which he helped create, and teaching English at Notre Dame, where he spent the last decade of his career as an in-residence savant and special assistant to the president...
...City, it's true, didn't go slurping down the financial tubes. But the election of Jimmy Carter certainly did nothing to reassure the quivering Metropolis--forget for a moment those Wall Street types and Rockefeller Foundation board members like Cy Vance and Mike Blumenthal. Where's this rural savant from anyway? Atlanta? Atlanta's where you go to make plane connections to somewhere important, like Miami Beach. And now, in the space of about a month, The New York Post--bang! New York magazine--zap! The Village Voice--good Lord, The Voice, for chrissakes--whoosh! All whisked away like...