Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This action has evoked a collective groan from members of a group formed last year: the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Composed of 43 scientists, science journalists, educators and magicians (who can best spot the sleight-of-hand and other tricks used by psychics), the committee's goal is to rebut what Author Charles Fair calls "the New Nonsense." Headed by Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, the committee includes such luminaries as Astronomer Carl Sagan, Psychologist B.F. Skinner, Philosopher Sidney Hook, Author Isaac Asimov...
...special summer session, the Knesset passed by an overwhelming vote (92 to 4) a resolution categorically repudiating the P.L.O. as a "discussion partner for the state of Israel in any Middle East peace negotiations." As a bit of parliamentary sleight of hand, the resolution was proposed by the Democratic Movement for Change so that the Labor Party could back it without seeming to support Premier Menachem Begin's ruling Likud coalition. A similarly worded Likud resolution had earlier been defeated by the D.M.C. and Labor opposition. The political maneuvering, however, hardly obscured the fact that there is a solid...
...Welles looms onto the screen at the outset, his stupendous bulk cloaked in a magician's cape, pulling pennies out of a boy's mouth and making keys disappear. Next he jumps to his editing room, where he's making movie magic--cutting and splicing a documentary about another sleight-of-hand expert. Hungarian art forger Elmyr deHory. But also about deHory's biographer. Clifford Irving, a hoaxster in his own right. Have it straight so far? F for Fake is thus a cinematic illusion (movie), directed by a renowned beguiler (Welles), about a world-famous flimflammer (Irving...
...Congressman, Ford mastered the art of parliamentary sleight of hand, allowing him to claim that he had voted for final passage of every major piece of civil rights legislation, and simultaneously that he had fought to stop each piece of civil rights legislation until the final vote. As Nixon's servant in the House, Ford strongly denied ever having known of an American president providing false or deceptive information. In fact, he had already been privately briefed on Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, a policy the administration was publicly denying...
Updike subtitles the novel "a romance," an artistic sleight of hand by which he allows himself the generous introduction of coincidences. The resonances of the original romance, the Garden of Eden parable, are plentiful. Jerry is a sort of suburban Adam, hopelessly in love, tempted to make his passion public and thereby cross the threshold into the "new morality." Sally, for her part, reveals herself to be the bad Eve as the action progresses; essentially sinful, she demonstrates her greediness and her poison. Beneath her pious confessions of concern for the feelings and future of Ruth and her children...