Word: taut
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...least remarked upon (and possibly least cared about) consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks is the utter disarray into which they have thrown the American novel. Used to be a literary novel was a taut, emotional family drama set in the Midwest about some sensitive kid coping with a crippling disease. Now books like that read like naive, escapist fantasies. These days it's supermarket thrillers that grapple with pressing geopolitical realities. Tom Clancy's world view has become more plausible and more relevant than Jeffrey Eugenides...
...aquamarine dress, Imelda Marcos explains how she has managed to survive her many ordeals. "Thank God I never lost that childlike innocence and the purity of vision and naivet?," she says. As she smiles, her cheeks, smoothed and buffed to an eerie luster, become even more impossibly taut. "That childlike innocence was most useful, because if I was a bit wiser, I wouldn't have been able to do anything, perhaps. So I'm glad I was not smart...
...ultimatum from Taylor and her mother - Give it everything or give it up - awakened her to her love for swimming and racing. Had Gould come through such a system, who knows what she might have achieved? Stripped to her costume at Sydney's Cronulla Beach recently, she revealed a taut and tanned body that has changed little since...
...peacekeeping effort further stretches a taut U.S. military, but not to the breaking point. Pentagon officials are confident they can handle Haiti, but with 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and an additional 11,000 on the ground in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration--particularly in an election year--isn't likely to dispatch more than a few thousand to Haiti for much longer than the three months mandated by the U.N. last week. "We stepped up, and we are the lead elements of the interim force," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who sees an international peacekeeping force...
...their Friday show at the Middle East Downstairs proved their music far surpasses expectations. Their first album, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, started a whispering campaign about ‘the new Strokes,’ but the tracks sounded much more lushly atmospheric than the taut, concise rock of that other New York band...