Word: uncommon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...read an editorial decrying "The American Invasion" (Sept. 17) of "Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Levi's Jeans" in Spain in the same issue that carried an article outlining the steps to bring McDonald's to Harvard Square. By keeping stores and restaurants in Harvard Square diverse and uncommon, it would seem the Harvard Square Defense Fund is doing the students of Harvard as great a service as it provides Cambridge residents. Who would want to go to school, or live, in a mall? Many people, from the teenage punks to the Nobel laureates cited in the latter article, make...
...original sin might be seen as allowing them to move confidently and guiltlessly forward. But it seems more likely that both Mormonism's attractiveness to converts and its fiscal triumphs owe more to what Hinckley terms "sociability," an intensity of common purpose (and, some would add, adherence to authority) uncommon in the non-Mormon business or religious worlds. There is no other major American denomination that officially assigns two congregation members in good standing, as Mormonism does, to visit every household in their flock monthly. Perhaps in consequence, no other denomination can so consistently parade the social virtues most Americans...
Through his 1,360 opinions, Justice Brennan changed all that, building an edifice of common sense and uncommon wisdom that transformed the landscape of America. If John Marshall was the chief architect of a powerful national government, then Brennan was the principal architect of the nation's system for protecting individual rights. Intellect alone could never have achieved so much, though Brennan's intellectual brilliance was indispensable. What animated him was passion and compassion, insight and empathy, and a vision of a Constitution of, by and for the people...
...Nabokov character who said that while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and naive, where flaws--the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so proud of--only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the improbable match of slender youth and that voice--an astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish recitative...
Fortunately, Capra, over at Columbia, found in Stewart "the uncommon common man": as a lion tamer of the wild Vanderhof clan in You Can't Take It with You and as Jefferson Smith, patron saint of patriotic lost causes, nurser of noble grudges, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. David O. Selznick saw Stewart as a worthy partner for Carole Lombard in the intelligent soaper Made for Each Other. Somebody at Universal made him the unlikely western hero of Destry Rides Again, opposite an amused Marlene Dietrich. These moguls may have undervalued Stewart as an appealing young actor who wouldn...