Word: swelling
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...first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a nation darkened by the breaking storm of the Civil War. He closed, "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." In those days, long before the advent of mass education, Lincoln had no doubt that Americans maintained a communal memory of their history...
...forget the Internet. You know, that shimmering entity that has enraptured human wonder like nothing since Helen of Troy. We're the "wired" generation, throwing out those silly paper books and riding the digital wave. Isn't that correct? Swell. Excuse me for not exuding giddiness over a development that, for all its great potential, still exists largely as a bog of mental quicksand for perverts and ninth-graders (often one and the same) to wade around in. Right now the experts are claiming that the Internet will forge a bond of understanding and goodwill across the globe. Of course...
...students. That frustrates principals like Mary Gordon of Windsor Elementary School in Des Moines. There, learning-disabled first-graders who have trouble with reading get pulled out for periods of the day to attend a small-group session with a tutor; meanwhile, the sizes of the two regular classes swell as high as 28 or 29. "Why not make it legal to use the special-education funds to help pay for a third class," she sensibly asks, "and have three classes...
...Alan Arkin), trapped in dreams of lost prosperity, urges his kids to think of themselves as nomads, adventurers wresting their livelihood from a harsh yet enticing landscape. His daughter Vivian (Natasha Lyonne)--15 and squirmy with all the anxieties, social and sexual, of her age group--knows better. The swell school district isn't worth what living in the slums of Beverly Hills entails: decamping from sleazy apartments at night to avoid the rent, taking in a crazy cousin (Marisa Tomei) in hopes her father will support the Abramowitzes in a style to which they're unaccustomed. There's farce...
Curious coverage early in the day featured a graphic ticking off the minutes of the President's testimony. Swell guests: Dee Dee Myers and James Carville, who had been at the White House earlier that...