Word: superhumans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Coupe de Monde is saving the nation from cultural humiliation and putting the blame for the fiasco where it belongs: on the rotten state of international cycling. "The whole thing just stinks," he says. "The intense nationalism, the publicity and the big-money sponsors have pressed riders to achieve superhuman feats, and many have turned to performance-enhancing drugs...
...personal relations with colleagues, family and friends, Lenin was relatively open and generous. Unlike many tyrants, he did not crave a tyrant's riches. Even when we strip Lenin of the cult that was created all around him after his death, when we strip away the myths of his "superhuman kindness," he remains a peculiarly modest figure who wore a shabby waistcoat, worked 16-hour days and read extensively. (By contrast, Stalin did not know that the Netherlands and Holland were the same country, and no one in the Kremlin inner circle was brave enough to set him straight...
...Clinton camp insisted on it, and no wonder. The most painful moment in either campaign came in watching George Bush and Bob Dole struggle feebly to adapt themselves to this alien venue. Bill Clinton glided through the town meetings, reveling in the chance to display his almost superhuman empathy. But Bush and Dole were older gents, from a generation that considered reticence a virtue and self-exposure a weakness--not, in other words, town-meeting material. They had the stunned look of cavemen thawed out from the frozen tundra and suddenly dropped into a Las Vegas casino. Bush...
...would be silly to suggest that people actually don't care about dirty doings by powerful pols. They may not let it affect their vote, but it would be superhuman not to find it darned interesting. "Is it interesting?" remains the most important test of newsworthiness. "Is it true?" is also important, naturally. But assuming a story about a politician's peccadilloes is true--assuming it's interesting is almost superfluous--should the media report it? That depends on a third test: Is there a public interest (in the sense of a stake, not mere curiosity) that justifies the invasion...
...managing editor of today no longer has the superhuman responsibilities of his predecessor, and the copy box has been replaced by wires and networking. Nobody yells "Carp-e-e," although choicer epithets are often used for a dilatory night editor. The practice of releasing unpublished stories to the public press, which had already been suspended once James wrote his article, died a natural death from old age somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s, its grave unmarked. But candidates still botch stories and give "wonderful excuses," and the flavor of a real newspaper is still there...