Word: shrewdly
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...Like shrewd roulette players, the Japanese are spreading their money around, spending millions on overseas research projects. Since the country lacks the experience to build an HSCT on its own, the Japanese are investing "just enough in both European and American projects so they can jump in with the winner and become partners," says John Swihart, a U.S. aerospace consultant...
Sexton was both a victim and a manipulator, as these things often go. She was shrewd, self-centered, half cracked. She abused her children. In episodes of rage she would seize her daughter Linda and choke or slap her, and one day she threw the little girl across the room. Linda says that when she was older, in her teens, her mother sexually abused her. The poet had many love affairs during her 24-year marriage, including a long sexual involvement with her psychiatrist -- a disgraceful breach of medical ethics on the doctor's part. Sexton actually paid for these...
Does the poet's work redeem the poet's mess? Sexton was working in a rich literary tradition. Her immediate American predecessors were not a wholesome precedent: John Berryman (alcoholic, suicide), Robert Lowell (episodically psychotic), Delmore Schwartz (alcoholic), Theodore Roethke (manic-depressive), Elizabeth Bishop (alcoholic). Sexton had shrewd instincts. "With used furniture he makes a tree," she wrote. "A writer is essentially a crook." Maybe...
Long before the oil came in, the Kuwaitis were known as shrewd traders. They plied the seas from the Indian subcontinent to the East African coast and almost always turned a profit. So it is not surprising that today, with the oil fires still burning and a return to normal life nowhere in sight, Kuwait's greatest effort involves merchandising its destitution...
Syrian President Hafez Assad ordinarily is no one's idea of a cooperative statesman, not with his record as a bloodily repressive dictator. But Assad is shrewd enough to sense which way the winds of world power are blowing. So last week he accepted the American formula for a Middle East peace conference. That, in effect, made him the first Arab leader since Egypt's Anwar Sadat to agree to public, direct peace talks with Israel: that is what the conference is supposed to lead to, after a brief ceremonial opening...