Word: swiftian
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...life, and his most recent one until now, The Light of Day(2003), about a disgraced former policeman trying to unravel a crime of passion, embody another of Swift's techniques: the action takes place in a single day, Ulysses-style. Tomorrow is a tool kit of such Swiftian tricks. Important facts are dripped sparingly, the narration is first person, and this time the action encompasses a single night. Lying sleepless next to her oblivious mate, Paula addresses an anxious monologue to her sleeping twins. "I'm the only one awake in this house on the night before...
...course, the risks of taking a headily Swiftian approach to social protest are obvious: what if the joke, which is after all pretty serious, flies right past those in the audience...
Thanks to high-tech baby-making techniques, women and men will increasingly no longer need to mate in the traditional ways, and Barbara Ehrenreich explores the implications with Swiftian wit. Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, says goodbye to politics, predicting that instead religion will become the primary force in shaping society. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, takes a different tack in answering the question, "Who Will Be the Next Elite?" The answer: not yesterday's Wasp or today's SAT high scorer, but the young entrepreneur...
...those mergers that discourage "economic efficiency" has many followers in the antitrust division of the Reagan Justice Department. Bork finds fault with most of the subsequent attempts by Congress to define anticompetitive practices and to interfere with vertical mergers. Deferential to legislatures in most constitutional disputes, Bork becomes positively Swiftian in his gloom about their capabilities in the economic field: "Congress as a whole is institutionally incapable of the sustained, rigorous and consistent thought that the fashioning of a rational antitrust policy requires...
Orwell did not view Nineteen Eighty-Four as his last will and testament, a Swiftian condemnation of humanity, as some, including Connolly, have claimed ("He was a dying man and he knew it"). Muggeridge remembers his last conversation with Orwell: "He said, 'I have some more books to write.' " Soon afterward, he married Sonia Brownell, a beautiful woman 15 years his junior, in his hospital room. T.O. Fyvel, another friend, recalls Orwell's saying, "When one is married, one has more reason to live." He died three months later...