Word: seemed
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...comes Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and it's just fine. Not great; just fine - a breezy roundelay about pretty people finding lust with improper strangers. It is also the kind of movie that isn't made much anymore, which makes the movie seem rare, perhaps precious. So a pre-mortem revaluation of Allen has begun. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote of "his recent creative resurrection," which would mean she values (and now I have to mention them) Scoop and Cassandra's Dream more highly than reason allows. I like the new movie, within reason; the question that nags...
...first glance, the decision to participate seems like a no-brainer for both candidates. Americans remain, to the continuing bafflement of other Westerners, stubbornly religious - a consistent 85% tell pollsters at the Pew Research Center that religion is an important part of their life. And for the most part, they don't separate religion from the political sphere. In those same polls, 70% of Americans say they want their President to be a person of faith. For Obama and McCain, an evening spent discussing matters of faith with the country's most popular Evangelical author and pastor would seem...
...China's class of 2008, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Throughout their college days, they have watched their nation's economy make double-digit annual growth seem routine. China has added nearly 11 million new jobs a year since 2004 (in contrast, the U.S. added about 1 million jobs last year), and in a culture in which the only thing revered more than education is making money, the former is supposed to lead directly to the latter. Just six months ago, to be young, educated and Chinese was to be in the global economy's sweet spot...
...While those numbers may seem high to the developed world, to China they represent a sharp deceleration that is already being reflected in the labor market. In 2006, Guangdong province created 2 million new jobs. Last year, Zhang Xiang, a provincial-government spokesman, said that figure was likely to be closer to 1 million. One sign of the times: the province is in the process of overhauling its unemployment-compensation system to better protect workers against sudden layoffs. Officially, China's unemployment rate is a relatively healthy 4.2%, but government statistics are dodgy, in part because significant numbers of China...
McCain began the town-hall meeting with an impassioned message about Georgia, urging the crowd to care about a "tiny little democracy, far, far away" that might seem irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. "History is often made in remote and obscure places," McCain said. Even if you don't share McCain's bellicose ideas about Russia, there was something inspiring about his appeal to the conscience of the crowd, his insistence that the struggles of Georgians should be the concern of Americans. But the audience just listened quietly, offering only a few subdued golf-claps - until McCain mentioned...