Word: standardizing
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...A380s standard coach seat is as good as it's going to get in the claustrophobic calamity that is air travel. The chair is 19-in. (48 cm) wide, affording about 5% more room than on other jets on this route. There's a 8.4 in. (21 cm) video screen with about 3,000 hours of programming, (about as long an overnight flight can feel). Alex Hervet, an A380 design engineer, explained to me that he repositioned the hinge point on the chair back an inch higher so that your knees won't get squeezed when the guy in front...
...didn't fail us, publishing heir Forbes and his co-author argue. We failed capitalism by getting in its way. As if we're the ones who created the sleazy subprime mortgages and exotic derivatives (graded phony AAA by real capitalists) that blew up the system. It's the standard Forbes canon: government and taxes bad; rich people good. The pair dutifully round up free-market evangelists from Smith to Hayek to Friedman to support their apologia but fail to add any real insight. Capitalism works, all right, but not like this...
...standard advice for young writers has always been "Write what you know." Raymond Carver did exactly that. It so happens that for most of his life, what Carver knew best was hardship, both physical and psychological. In his short stories--tight-lipped parables of abjection that became hugely influential in the 1980s--life is a kind of nonstop distress sale. The apartments are shabby; the rent is unpaid; the living room furniture has been carried outside and strewn across the lawn. The people seem dislocated too, even when they're stuck in one place, licking their wounds and drinking hard...
...rest of the all-star cast funnels their respective talents into the standard roster of kid-movie roles. Sean William Scott (“Role Models”) takes on the wisecracking sidekick, while the inimitable John Cleese is the requisite Evil Professor, whose refined British accent seems wholly out of place in the apparently country-less Planet 51. As the unexpected visitor, Chuck is self-centered and arrogant, and he struggles to understand why the celebrity status he enjoyed at home carries no weight in his new surroundings. As he’s pursued by an army...
...limited audience—as Don LaFontaine, “movie preview guy” has an unmistakable, almost superhuman voice that can be heard in more than 5,000 previews and nearly a quarter million commercials. LaFontaine’s deep cadences have long set the standard for the voiceover industry. As Ashton Smith, the man who narrated the promos for “XXX” put it, “When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don’s. It’s God trying to sound like...