Word: vacuous
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...book The Plug-In Drug, gave a memorable, if rather alarmist, description of the trancelike state TV induces: "The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth (if there are any). The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look...
...testify as expert witnesses, hoping to persuade the jury that pictures may resemble porn but also affect the viewer in the more complex manner of art. "These photographs are not meant to titillate," says Arnold Lehman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. "They don't have that vacuous anonymity that pornography is so much about...
...Quayle serene merely because he is vacuous, preferring drift to ideology? That view obliges one to explain how, in politics, he drifted often and early to the top. Even his friends admit that his success was not by any blaze of intellect. Says M. Stanton Evans, the ex-editor of the Indianapolis News, who helped Quayle get his first political appointment: "There is a cycle in all of his offices. When he comes in, he is underestimated -- too young, too inexperienced -- and then he surpasses people's expectations." In other words, Quayle first gets the job and then gets qualified...
COURSES in Harvard's Core Curriculum may be maligned for being superfical and vacuous, but at least they are popular. Of the courses with the 10 largest enrollments this semester, nine were Core offerings. Social Analysis 10, "Principles of Economics," weighed in with 769 students. Science B-29, "Human Behavioral Biology," has 600, even though its course catalogue listing warns that enrollment is limited to 500. The only non-Core course to break into the top 10 was a notorious gut, History 1340b, "European Intellectual History...
...over this upsurge of freedom are some impolitic questions about America's own role in fostering free elections abroad. Democracy is indisputably good for the world, but are U.S.-style campaign techniques necessarily good for democracy? Should Americans feel elated if election campaigns from Manila to Moscow become as vacuous as the contest between George Bush and Michael Dukakis...