Word: starker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...finish off with an expletive-filled punch line, the same sort of writing comes off as glib in the mouths of more earthy characters like Mitchell or Alex. The real success in this method of punchy writing is Ellen, whose inexhaustible supply of sarcastic retorts only makes her helplessness starker and ultimately moving.Beane’s play is constructed as a progressing series of monologues and dialogues, allowing the characters to alternate private thoughts and conversational self-discovery. One of the play’s greatest strengths is its ability to weave the four narratives of the characters together...
...Empire’s burden: “The task we have set ourselves is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state.” About a decade earlier, his predecessor Philip Mitchell had outlined this duty in starker terms still: “The African has the choice of remaining a savage or of adopting our civilization, culture, religion and language.” (Incidentally, both were eventually knighted.) Blinded by an unshakable conviction in their own tradition’s superiority, it mattered little to these administrators...
Through the windows of a Paris cafe on the Right Bank, the lunchtime crowd chatting over red wine and espressos can see water gushing from stone sphinxes under a carved column topped with a golden angel. It is hard to imagine a starker contrast between this gracious eatery and the ravaged villages of Darfur, yet among the diners here is a man who could hold the key to peace in the devastating conflict in western Sudan. "The Sudan regime is an outlaw regime," Abdul Wahid el Nur, leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement, shouts, slamming his fist...
...contrast is starker when The War presents a newsreel from the battle of Tarawa--issued on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders--that shows ghastly images of Marine dead. "This," the newsreel narrator intones, "is the price we had to pay for a war we didn't want." Today the government is loath to lay out a price, or ask one. "People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents," Burns says. "Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort...
...approach to transportation projects is almost as dysfunctional as our approach to water projects, which I wrote about last week. There's no starker example than Young's $375 billion bonanza, which he bragged he had stuffed "like a turkey." The bill included more than 6,300 earmarks inserted by individual congressmen, including not one but two bridges to nowhere in Alaska - the notorious $223 million crossing to the island of Gravina, population 50, and a $229 million boondoggle near Anchorage known as Don Young's Way. The entire bill was known as "TEA-LU," an acronym for the awkwardly...