Word: throwbacks
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Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of old. She doesn't merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons established an engineering program (the first at any women's school) and added seminars focused on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous "likes" and "ums" from the campus idiom. At a meeting to discuss...
...electronically beyond them? We wake up every few months and find ourselves in a weird new world. Do the educated and successful and privileged classes of the information-saturated post-industrial West now consider the reading of books to be something optional and quaint, like candles at dinner - a throwback, arduous and unnecessary, like knowing Latin and Greek (once indispensable among the educated...
...Bush is a throwback when it comes to this new style of political bravado. His combination of Wasp reticence and Texas canniness gives him an old-fashioned feel. If Clinton was often too clever by half, in Disraeli's famous phrase, Bush sometimes deliberately seems only half-clever. But who do we like more: the smartest kid in class who sits in the first row and answers every question, or the fellow who sits in the back row and surprises you when he gets the right answer? I'm sure George Bush never sat in the first...
...worry about. But Putin can't afford to simply buy the Bush line on NATO expansion, because the Russian president is trying to project the image of a confident, assertive new Russia, ready to stand up for its interests. And accepting NATO expansion onto its doorstep would be a throwback to the Yeltsin foreign policy of rolling over for everything the West demanded, a policy which all of Russia disdains and wants to forget as fast as possible...
...loser if you aren't doing at least two things at all times: making a cell-phone call while checking messages on your Blackberry, checking stock quotes while making love to your partner, and so on. It's strange to think of watching the tube as a throwback to a simpler, more contemplative day, but that's what it looks like amid the URLs and chat room quotes cluttering the screen right...