Word: singulars
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...Global warming: F Kyoto was a singular defeat for the Bush administration on the international stage. It had hoped that by firmly nixing the treaty, it would force everyone back to the drawing board to negotiate a new approach. Instead, they went ahead and concluded a deal. Instead of leading, the U.S. now finds itself having to respond to the initiatives of others...
Over dinner a few days ago, my summer roommate asked, “Has anyone seen the spoon?” Note the singular, “spoon.” Luckily, our schedules were different enough so that no fights broke out over our beloved spoon, but when I wanted ice cream, which required a metal spoon to dig out frozen bits of cookie, and my roommate wanted to eat her soup, we finally admitted that it was time to buy some silverware...
...irony is that the very singularity of the event makes it both more of a story, and less, at the same time. More because it's the man who bites the dog, it fits our modern definition of news as something that departs from the ordinary. Less because in something so singular there's very often no lessons to be learned, no larger meaning to be gleaned. It stands on its own, uniquely horrifying but strangely and reassuringly unique...
...that the film director is, for the most part, "an interfering parasite," and "much of your time [as a screenwriter] will be spent in a creative wasteland" -- the single most revealing piece in "Dig" is "King Weirdo," his ode to his first literary hero, Edgar Allen Poe. Southern's singular fascination for Poe's duplicitous frame device in "A. Gordon Pym" -- which insists that the story you're reading is an account of actual events submitted to Poe -- is reflected in several of his own short stories, including the marvellously titled "Heavy Put-Away, or a Hustle Not Wholly Devoid...
...more portentious for the danger signs we have hung on its perimeter. For most of us outside Oklahoma City, the terror of April 19, 1995 has faded; McVeigh himself, with his angry-white-male vehemence, already seems a man out of time. His case may be too singular to spur real death-penalty debate. But if this makes us tune out the pregame, it may make the moment itself more jarring. It is still a rare and godlike thing to know in advance the moment of a person's death - to know that this man with this name in this...