Word: usual
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...merit - Atonement was TIME's book of the year in 2001. Yes, I feel a personal karmic debit to McEwan, because I once misspelled his name as McKewan very publicly in print and feel guilty about it (I was thinking of Ian McKellen, OK?) One could haul out the usual verities about how all great writers steal, Shakespeare included, and how in the Middle Ages plagiarism wasn't even considered a bad thing, but it's really not necessary. The disparity between the greatness of McEwan?s achievement and the pettiness of this complaint is vertiginous. That McEwan even bothered...
December is fast-approaching, and students who stored their winter gear over the summer may find this holiday season a bit colder than usual. A large number of Kirkland House students—about two dozen, according to two Kirkland House seniors who have volunteered to gather complaints—are still without the clothing, furniture, and dorm paraphernalia that the Watertown-based company Collegeboxes promised to deliver to their doors in September. Three months later, students have had to complain repeatedly to Collegeboxes and threaten legal action against the company, and only now have they begun to recover?...
...Agriculture Department asked experts at the National Academies of Science to weigh in, and their committee agreed that "hunger" should be reserved for cases when persistent food insecurity results in "prolonged, involuntary lack of food," and the result is "discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation." But that pain was not what the USDA was measuring - researchers were not going out and interviewing poor or homeless people about how they felt when they'd gone for a day without eating. What they could quantify was exactly how often people said that "We worried whether...
...sanctions on Kim's dictatorial regime would do even more damage. History has proved that such economic sanctions would bring more suffering to the broad population of the country, while the ruthless tyrant, his army generals and his close Communist Party buddies would enjoy the horn of plenty as usual. It is time for the Bush Administration to eat humble pie after this failure and use diplomacy rather than threatening language. Syed Rashid Ali Shah Vroomshoop, the Netherlands...
...after the world had marked the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Benedict threw himself into the maelstrom. The unlikely venue was his old teaching grounds, the University of Regensburg. His vehicle was a talk about reason as part of Christianity's very essence. His nominal target was his usual suspect, the secular West, which he said had committed the tragic error of discarding Christianity as reason-free. But this time he had an additional villain in his sights: Islam, which he said actually did undervalue rationality and which he strongly suggested was consequently more inclined to violence...