Word: brisk
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...wear them down while frantically moving to line up other potential sources beyond Rio and BHP Billiton for next year and beyond. China is the world's largest steel producer, and despite the global recession, its factories are running close to flat-out thanks to enormous infrastructure construction and brisk sales for new autos and apartments. That means it would appear to have little leverage in pursuit of the price cuts on iron ore that it seeks: a 45% reduction from last year's record levels. (Japan and South Korean steelmakers got cuts of 33% from 2008 levels...
...first Ampex tape recorders. It helped stoke in Paul the familiar dream of a trailblazing artist: to put on wax the music in his head. What emerged, in 1948, with the two-sided hit "Lover" and "Brazil," was something he called the New Sound. It comprised several tracks of brisk, intricate guitar work meticulously laid on top of one another; if he made a mistake with the final track, he had to start over again. The New Sound, which he refined in a later home studio in Mahwah, N.J., amounted to a one-man musical revolution...
...help. But it remains a relatively poor country, with an annual per capita income of $6,000, compared with $39,000 in the U.S. and $33,400 in the E.U. To be solidly middle class in China's big cities is to have an income of about $12,000. Brisk though auto sales may be, most Chinese still can't afford a Volkswagen or a Buick, let alone a BMW. Even as China's consumers feel richer, their share of its economy may not change much until Beijing enacts reforms to the health-care and social-security systems, steps that...
Home exchanges are not new. At least one group, Intervac, has been facilitating such arrangements since 1953. But traffic online is particularly brisk these days, with several sites, including HomeExchange.com--which was founded in 1992 and, with some 28,000 listings, bills itself as the world's largest home-exchange club--reporting that membership has increased 30% or more this year. (See pictures of high-end homes that won't sell...
...find it and why they stay with it. In "Travis, B," a battered cowboy acts out a romantic fantasy only to find he has no idea how to meld it with reality. Meloy also mines relationships for their own facets of loneliness, most often spawned by distrust. In one brisk, scathing story, "Two-Step," we observe a philandering husband from the perspective of his mistress, who thinks she is clear-eyed ("He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become it") but who is actually hopelessly besotted. In another, "The Children...