Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just hearing these early recordings, one takes pleasure from Taylor's sheer audacity. He does what all musicians at some point dream of doing: going on stage and banging on the piano with hands and fists, like a film technician simply searching for the neat sound effect. But as Taylor's recordings from the 1960s show, his music is much more profound than that...
...rascals that we are we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our lynx eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect...
...wasn't this turmoil -- especially the rebellion in Chiapas -- itself an outgrowth of NAFTA? It's true that farmers there will suffer as protective trade barriers fall. But a deeper source of their discontent is sheer, longstanding poverty. And it's no coincidence that Chiapas, Mexico's poorest region, is also farthest from the U.S. and the balming effect of trade. The unrest of Mexican peasants is undeniably a reminder that free trade's overall benefits entail real costs, but it's equally a reminder that the alternative is worse. In a thoroughly protectionist world, all of Mexico might today...
...savoring every lurid manifestation of the decadence. Americans, in other words, found themselves torn between enjoying filthy pleasures guaranteed by the First Amendment and wistfully admiring the Singapore caning. By such almost unconscious dialectics, the people worked at sifting out the rules for a society paganized by sheer information and searching for a moral grid. Where are the morals to discipline the freedom that permits the sleaze in an inside-out culture of exposure? Moral processing is now the chief American art form and preoccupation...
Midway between its icy source in Tibet and the fertile delta at its mouth in Shanghai, 3,900 miles to the east, China's Yangtze River hurtles through a series of sheer chasms known as the Three Gorges. Legend has it that the scenic channel was carved in stone by the goddess Yao Ji as a way of diverting the river around the petrified remains of a dozen dragons she had slain for harassing the peasants. Over the centuries painters and poets have idealized the canyons as a mist-shrouded wilderness. While that may have once been true, the region...