Word: traps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rowling found herself in the classic single-mother trap. She could not afford child care, so she could not go to work, and when she tried to put Jessica in state-funded care, she was told she was "coping too well." For almost a year, until she found teaching work, Rowling lived off public assistance. Every day, to escape her damp, unheated flat, she'd take the baby to the nearest cafe and write away, nursing a cup of coffee. In 1995, after she found an agent in a writers' directory, a British publisher offered her a tiny advance...
...serve thy country and thy kind" as a conditional would make little sense. Instead, we read the second inscription as an imperative--as if Harvard is now imploring us to put the wisdom learned inside the Yard to practical effect. Put the two readings together, and you have a trap: Harvard beckons us in with the promise of learning and personal intellectual growth. We merely need to enter. But once inside, we find that there is a price to the privilege of intellectual growth: the responsibility to improve ourselves and society. We entered, or perhaps scaled...
Reading the inscriptions as a trap--an offer on one side, an obligation on the other--is not necessarily a reflection of the kind of directional transformation that should go on at college and at Harvard in particular. But what would happen if we instead read the inscriptions more consistently--if we read the entering inscription as an imperative, thinking of "Enter" as a command, and read the departing inscription as an offer and not an imperative...
...only trap Harvard falls into is that it sometimes is a little lax on defense, assured that its fleet skating and power will compensate for any positional lapses...
...woman who has ever lived with a man will be particularly dismayed by Intimacy. A claustrophobic little trap of a novel, it recounts one night in the life of a screenwriter named Jay as he prepares to abandon Susan, his partner of six years and the mother of their two young sons. As Jay goes through the rituals of an ordinary evening at home, he also meditates on the history of their relationship and waits until Susan goes to sleep so he can pack his bags. "It is the saddest night," the novel begins, "for I am leaving...