Word: stratums
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When archaeologists from Alpha Centauri alight on earth and begin excavating the rubble of our world, they will be astonished to find, on reaching the stratum circa 1996, that they have stumbled upon a civilization that at the same time produced 1) Dick Morris and 2) pictures of Jupiter's largest moon (430 million miles away) taken from a distance of 162 miles...
...full of decorum that you can hardly compare them to the rowdier figures elsewhere in 17th century Dutch art, coming on with wineglasses and making gestures of sexual insinuation. Vermeer's are seldom marked by experience, and except for maids and servants, they all belong to the same stratum--a class, needless to say, rather above his. Does this make them insipid? Sometimes, yes, but it can also turn them into vessels of lyric innocence, as in the Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665-66, with her liquidly painted turban of virginal blue, who turns her shining gaze to meet...
...they have to change -- and most accept that only reluctantly -- Cubans are determined to change in their own way. No matter where you go on the island, what stratum of society you probe, you hear the same mantra: the achievements of the revolution. What they call the revolution is not communism, not socialist ideology, not even veneration for Fidel. "The achievements of the revolution" is code for cradle-to-grave health care, free and universal education, and generous social-security payments. Castro brought these benefits to millions who had almost nothing before the revolution, and after 34 years they...
...cross-cutting cleavages" in keeping pluralist societies alive. The idea is that individuals will have more than one group affiliation they care about--so they won't end up fracturing into single autonomous groups with opposing interests. As long as a single religious group doesn't populate one economic stratum, for example, religion and class can't combine to create a single warring faction...
Mamet intends to examine the pathetic underside of society, a stratum playwrights tend to ignore. In the process, however, he delivers a play that is as redundant and empty as their lives. Director Spiro Veloudos, whose sense for dialogue and dialect is keen, unfortunately fails to impact energy and drive to a script that requires much...