Word: thinning
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...rationalize ambition as idealism - or ancient ones. His centuries-old Count Dracula has the sepulchral poignancy of a majestic senior citizen doomed to play the vampire yet determined to play it to the hilt. And Welles sounds hokiest, and farthest from his own prodigious, wandering youth, when imitating the thin, whiny timbre of small-town America's young men in such period pieces as "I'm a Fool," "Seventeen," "Ah, Wilderness!" and "The Magnificent Ambersons." To hear him grow, and grow old, in a single hour, listen to his Edmond Dantes. The immature, innocent tones are tortured...
...witnessed the "angular" approach for myself two years ago when Cornell University permitted me to observe its admissions meetings. In Cornell's distinct parlance, renaissance students were dubbed "spread too thin." The admission officers also had a highly refined ability to detect whether kids were undertaking activity after activity to pad their resumes - or out of genuine enthusiasm. Sometimes this was just a hunch, other times committee members added up the time students claimed to spend on various extracurriculars only to realize the total exceeded the number of hours in a school week. In the final decision-making process, idiosyncrasy...
...Another technological breakthrough occurred when Klint began playing around with wood lamination - a sandwich of thin pieces glued together - that the British had developed for airplanes in response to a lack of aluminum. The result is shapes that can be twisted and turned like plastic and yet remain sturdy. "Danish designers try to make their ideas suitable for industrial production,'' says Krogh. "It's something to do with our mentality that we don't like to do things that are very ornate." Krogh claims his own first: he used what is called precompressed wood, a process invented in Denmark...
...VAGINA MONOLOGUE: Susanna Kaysen, the bestselling author of "Girl, Interrupted," tells the story of how her vagina began to give her pain rather than pleasure in "The Camera My Mother Gave Me" (Knopf; October 10). PW replies, Who cares? "Thin, disappointing...FORECAST: Already the subject of a NYT piece suggesting this ?autopathography? may become the target of a backlash against such transgressive confessions, Kaysen?s slight memoir will spark some controversy, but don?t expect ?Girl, Interrupted?-level sales." Kirkus is more entertained. "Pithy, funny, adventurous, sexy, and eye-opening...Disguised as plain, brown memoir, a voluptuous exploration of sexuality...
...wingspan and solar panels that power the 14 propellers that keep it aloft, and Tuesday it traveled higher (96,500 feet) than any other non-rocket-powered plane. The possible uses are twofold. NASA hopes that this test will help it to design aircraft that can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere. And some entrepreneurial sorts think that eventually a network of these high-flying birds could serve as low-cost alternatives to communications satellites...