Word: thurberism
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American University political scientist James Thurber, author of the forthcoming book Remaking Congress, calls politics in the information age "hyperpluralism." He remembers sitting in congressional hearings for the 1986 tax-reform law as lobbyists watched the proceedings with cellular phones at the ready. "They started dialing the instant anyone in that room even thought about changing a tax break." Their calls alerted interested parties and brought a deluge of protest borne by phone, letter or fax. "There is no buffer allowing Representatives to think about what's going on," Thurber says. "In the old days you had a few months...
FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, by Stephen King (Viking; 763 pages; $22.95), offers a quartet of horror novellas that show this vexing and engaging storyteller at close to his best. What has always charmed and exasperated about King's enormous run of books is a quality not exactly childlike -- James Thurber could be childlike, and so could E.B. White -- but rather teenager-like. The early teens, at that; King is stuck permanently at about 13 1/2. He bops through these stories with the mischievous imagination of a young adolescent, and also the wearying energy, sloppiness, ignorance and complete lack of subtlety...
...This is the busiest time of the year for us," said Bob Thurber, dispatcher for Bonanza Bus Lines...
William Maxwell, novelist and former New Yorker fiction editor, is reluctant to talk about the magazine; but after saying that the "subject has been done to death," he adds "almost," and pages of anecdotes follow about Harold Ross, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs and Maxwell's "three wonderful writers all named John: John O'Hara, John Cheever and John Updike...
From the moment Moore and Ronis met nearly four years ago, while bit players in the freshman show, Thurber Carnival, they initiated the distinctive language they still share--a mixture of funny accents and idioms that comprises a gallery of imaginary people, many of them women...