Word: spectacularities
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...hedge funds isn't what it used to be. Once they were known for being secretive and small--for taking money from millionaires, making winning trades in exotic investments like swaps and warrants and collecting massive fees in near anonymity. The setup was disrupted only by an occasional, spectacular blowup. Over the past four years, though, assets in these funds have more than doubled, to $1.3 trillion, while returns have flagged--and that changes a lot of things...
That glimmering water wall is more than a spectacular variation on wallpaper. It's an ingenious visual trick, an instantaneous conversion of nature to art by the mere act of framing the scene. Europe in the 18th century saw a vogue among painters and travelers for the Claude glass, an optical device that framed views in the manner of landscape painter Claude Lorrain and lent them something like his subdued tones. The Mediatheque functions in a similar way, but with even simpler means, aestheticizing a bit of nature simply by pointing us toward it just so. In a room where...
...Soviet orbit for eleven years suddenly swung out of its gravitational course into a still unsteady national axis. It had never happened before. As the world looked on, incredulous, a people armed principally with courage and determination (and a few filched guns) fought one of the most spectacular revolutions of modern times. Behind barricades, from rooftops and apartment windows, they harried their powerful oppressors." Read more at timearchive.com...
...based on movies that couldn't be more different. One, Mary Poppins is from the P.L. Travers books that inspired the 1964 Walt Disney boxofficepalooza. The other, Grey Gardens, stitches songs onto the true saga of Edith Beale and her daughter Edie, the Jackie O. relatives who lived in spectacular squalor and family rancor in the ritzy Long Island village of East Hampton, and whose eccentricities the documentarians Albert and David Maysles put on display in their 1975 film...
...funneled to various militia groups, according to U.N. sources. The program was an open secret in Somalia and among the African diplomatic corps, but its only success was to bolster support for the Islamic Courts among a population weary of anarchy and opposed to foreign meddling. "It was a spectacular disaster," says John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group. "Not only were the militia leaders routed, but the U.S. and CIA support for these militias led to strengthened support for the Islamic Courts...