Word: smarts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kishore Mahbubani is that rarest of creatures, a card-carrying member of the sober, slightly stuffy international establishment who still occasionally manages to hurl provocative smart bombs into the debate on global affairs?an agent provocateur in gentleman's clothing. In the mid '90s, when the U.S. was aflutter with insecurity about how it was losing the global economic race to (believe it or not) Japan, he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs on "Asian values." At the time it caused a furious discussion among American foreign-policy ?lites about whether there was any difference in "values" between East...
...have a grudge against Mao? No, I don't feel any need for revenge. We bent over backward to be fair to him. But we could find nothing nice to say. He was completely immoral, and yet also very smart. He could rise from seemingly impossible situations. We were constantly impressed. I wrote a couple of sentences reflecting how appalled I was by him, but we edited them out. We wanted readers to draw their own conclusions...
...restaurants had been stalled for two years, budging just 0.9% in 2003 and 2.9% last year, far below the pace set by its competitors. The culprit? A sudden burst of creativity from the big guns in the fast-food wars, McDonald's and Burger King, as well as some smart plays by smaller chains like Hardee's and KFC. For years, McDonald's and Burger King had relied on their size to generate growth, opening hundreds of new stores every year to pump up sales. Meanwhile, Wendy's had some very lucrative ground to itself. It is only one-fifth...
...fairness, it must be said that the script (by director Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer) breaks with sobriety to give someone, usually Michael Caine as Alfred, Bruce's faithful, fussy butler, something smart to say. Eventually, however, Nolan, who directed the tricky, widely admired Memento, must oblige the conventions of the big-budget action movie: darkly improbable weaponry, pyrotechnics, car chases (the Batmobile is admittedly pretty novel), editing that edges toward incomprehensibility...
...cast in Craig Monahan's just-released tale about a troubled teen working in a small-town peach cannery - but as the central figure's stepmother Jude. It was a seismic shift for McKenzie, whose character ages 20 years. "She had to cross a bridge," recalls Monahan. "She's smart, she knew the time was right and this was a good role to do it in. She ran towards it really." By turns warm and worn, McKenzie is a revelation as Jude, no more so than in the scene where she sings The Carnival is Over across a pub counter...