Word: sleight
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...evening, is a pedantic and ingrown mockery. David Mamet has trundled out the theme of a reversal between two artistes, the aged veteran and the anxious ingenue, and bandied "concepts" about the stage for the better part of an hour before switching the characters' roles in a sleight of hand so fast it would have dazzled Houdini. The reversal, developed with delicious deliberation in A life in the Theater, happening so awkwardly here, so long after we have lost all interest in the characters, serves only to leave an unpleasant taste of dissatisfaction and cheapness. Bill Young plays the established...
...about Jefferson's foreign policy: "a discredit to my country.") Woodrow Wilson made scholarly attempts to rescue Jefferson from the presidential scrap heap. It was left to Franklin Roosevelt, no scholar but a superb manager of political stage effects, to elevate Jefferson to the presidential pantheon. The intellectual sleight of hand was simple enough: the New Deal was the modern embodiment of the Jeffersonian "spirit," in which government, depending on its purposes, was either "a threat and a danger" or "a refuge and help" to the people. And to this day the Democrats hold Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners...
...Zombies begins: "The zombies say: 'Wonderful time! Beautiful day! Marvelous singing! Excellent beer! Would that lady marry me? I don't know!' In a high wind the leaves fall from the trees, from the trees." Different dreams, the same empty metaphors. Undeniably, Barthelme has perfected his sleight of hand since 1961, when the first of these 60 stories was published. But as even animal trainers and patient readers know, one trick, no matter how clever, is not enough to sustain a career. By the tenth Barthelme miniature, what began as curiosity and amusement alters to boredom...
...anyway." No consensus was reached, but by the time the meeting was over, even hawks on the White House staff were floating stories of possible military base closings, cutbacks in military medical and retirement benefits, and other savings in a newly coined category of "nonessential" military spending. By this sleight of mouth, only "essential" spending-for example, new weapons systems-would be covered by Reagan's guarantee of a boost...
Gardner saves his liveliest derision for gullible scientists and science writers -particularly those who lauded Israeli Magician Uri Geller and his "unearthly ability" to bend spoons with the power of his mind. In a dazzling chapter, Gardner, an amateur prestidigitator, demonstrates a dozen methods for deceiving the credulous, including sleight of hand, palmed magnets and misdirection. Yet even these instructions are offered more in fun than in malice. For early on, the skeptic's skeptic acknowledges that the most obvious evidence of fraud will not budge the True Believer. Instead, Gardner writes for those who agree with the 1920s...