Word: trivializes
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Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
...some of his staffers called their new editor "the Iron Mouse" because of his self-deprecating manner and his irresistible whim. Slowly, meticulously, that whim widened The New Yorker's concerns and investigations. The world that the reader now entered became far more real and gritty, far less trivial and debonair. To the untutored eye, The New Yorker was the fixture as before; the magazine's makeup remained unaltered. The glittering Van-Cleef & Arpels brooches, the Boehm porcelains, the Rolls-Royces and Mercedes still whispered their seductions from the sidelines. But, incongruously, in the columns that threaded between...
...comparison with the great influenza epidemics, the plague that hit Minnesota recently was a trivial affair. One hundred and twenty-five people were stricken with nausea and diarrhea after eating in a local restaurant. No one died in the outbreak, but about 50 were sufficiently sick to consult physicians, eleven were afflicted seriously enough to require hospitalization, and many were bedridden for one or more days. Normally, such an outbreak, which was traced to Salmonella bacteria, receives little attention from health authorities...
...point of the idea of a university, whatever it is, is to enable people to acquire moral values. However, he rarely indicates what values he has in mind. But once exams start, all the nonsense is forgotten. Frivolous questions like "Do you need anything from the Square?" evoke not trivial requests for cookies or soap but sober, serious replies, like "Yes, the Monarch Notes for The Red and the Black." And as students settle down to serious work, Harvard, too, turns to serious business-administering the grades so essential to rational decision-making by law schools and banks...
...entertainment and information" format is so far a staccato muddle of the shallowly portentous ("What is your outlook on the state of the world, Roy?" asked former New York Mayor John Lindsay, now a guest commentator on the show, of British Home Secretary Roy Jenkins) and the trivial (last Monday was Joan of Arc's birthday). Jazzy film montages flick past to numbingly appropriate pop music (example: shots of gold bars set to the strains of Donovan's Mellow Yellow). The only relief is the show's solidly professional, twice-hourly newscast anchored by Peter Jennings...