Word: shrewdly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most in need of reform--the FBI and the CIA--over the past 60 years have become famously hidebound and self-protective creatures. As four or five outside groups launched probes of--and proposed changes to--FBI and CIA activities after 9/11, the bureau and the agency played a shrewd, wait-'em-out game, allowing small changes proposed by outsiders but drawing a hidden "line of death" at anything dramatic, especially if it undercut their roles, their missions and, most of all, their budgets...
...such it would be but harm! and a little diverting. But as in several other things, this nation carries many of its passions to extremes. The same popular Hero-worship that endows a shrewd financier with the halo of a gold-dispensing. Maecenas only too often gives a successful murderer all the attributes of a Nietzschean superman. And the American university would often be just as logical in giving an honorary degree to the wizard with a sawed-off shotgun as it is in bestowing its academic laurels on a merchant prince. That public opinion is a shallow wench whose...
Sylvain Chomet’s film aims for a multinational texture and is largely devoid of dialogue, but nevertheless retains a distinctly French sensibility with a penchant for shrewd cultural allusions. A clubfooted widow, Madame Souza, trains her chubby grandson Champion to become a stick-thin cyclist with the help of bulky canine Bruno and her restless whistle. One day, Champion is mysteriously kidnapped, along with two of his fellow Tour de France riders, by amusingly ominous members of the French mafia. In hot pursuit, Madame Souza travels to the Dionysian metropolis Belleville, where she enlists the help...
...ability to work with all kinds of leaders to promote common interests. As Governor of Vermont, Dean was a prudent fiscal manager who expanded important social services while balancing the budget for 11 straight years. The DNC, which suffers from a multi-million dollar deficit, could use a shrewd money manager like Dean...
...place where sex and liquor and talent all spun around to produce some truly phosphorescent elements of the national disposition. That's the history that James Traub tells in The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (Random House; 313 pages). It's a shrewd and rollicking account of a place that rose to glory as a playground for all classes, skidded into a chaos of drugs and porn, and has come back as a family fun center. Traub has a high time flying us through the Square's gamy saga, from the chorus-girl...