Word: summing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Joseph Kraft was the funniest, frantic in his role as the guardian of the nation's self-image. In a column called "Nashville, the motion picture, tries--but fails--to tell what's wrong with America," Kraft points out the danger of trying to sum up the country. Indeed, "the analytic tools shaped by the likes of Marx and Freud have come to grief trying to define what's wrong." Leading into an interpretation of the film, he writes that "the film's view of the nation's flaws is so general and so wrong that it seems useful...
...making a purely descriptive movie: he junked the concept of the filmmaker himself. Opal, the BBC reporter, busily chronicling American and acting sillier than the Nashvilleans, is a parody of Altman. And the cookbook critics, trying to get a grip on themselves, string adjectives together searching for how to sum...
...sum, there is no alternative to capitalism that credibly promises both wealth and liberty. Despite its transitory woes and weaknesses, capitalism in the foreseeable future will not only survive but also stands to prosper and spread. Perhaps the most balanced judgment of Adam Smith's wondrous system is Winston Churchill's famous conclusion about democracy: It is the worst system?except for all those other systems that have been tried and failed...
...biography consists of little more than a professor's résumé: son of a collector of customs; student at Oxford; a popular lecturer at Edinburgh University; tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch; full professor of logic and then of moral philosophy at Glasgow; and author in 1759 of a philosophical treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A bachelor, Smith relied on his mother and a maiden cousin to keep house; if any love affairs ever distracted him from his studies, they have gone unrecorded. "I am a beau in nothing but my books," he once remarked...
...LOTTERIES. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery . . . because the undertaker could make nothing by it. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price, [yet] the soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds . . . In a lottery in which no prize exceeded twenty pounds . . . there would not be the same demand for tickets...