Word: grueling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...U.S.S.R. both had The Bomb, what was the point in pretense or courtesy? Pinter's quietly murderous insolence was the theatrical equivalent to Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the United Nations. Good manners were the creamy lie the great powers poured on the toxic gruel of their realpolitik. The only counteroffensive was to write plays in which people misbehaved, tortured each other; for the postwar generation, writing what the Cambridge Review called his "skull-beneath-the-skin" plays, he was the Pinter of Our Discontent. Back then, his works were taken as murky dramas; now they look like snarky...
Still, a starving man won't pass up gruel just because it's not Mom's pot roast. And after Lieberman gave the delegates that first mouthful of stewed maverick, things started looking...
...even in coach. There are power outlets at every seat. The most profound change, though, doesn't look like much of an improvement at first. Like many U.S. carriers, Virgin America charges for food in economy class. But flight attendants don't dole it out from a cart like gruel in the orphanage; a touchscreen at each seat lets passengers pick what they want and pay by credit card. A few minutes after I swiped my card, an attendant brought my fruit-and-cheese box and a glass of cabernet to my seat. The food was fine, but what...
...will have to travel. The snakehead has promised Little Lin a real tourist visa to Russia, then a clandestine overland trip through Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and onward to England. Little Lin knows he will have to hide in vans and safe houses and subsist on rice gruel. But he is optimistic. Someone from his village recently arrived safely in England after using the same snakehead he has contacted. "It's very safe," he insists. "Bad things can happen here...
...long as you don’t insist upon credit for the accomplishment. There is wisdom here and not the kind usually found in those books on business leadership that proliferate in airport bookstalls. A wimp or a wuss will not do, and mere popularity and likeability are thin gruel for an effective presidency. Intellectual passion moral vision, and the ability to recognize and support excellence in other are among the qualities to be most desired in a president of Harvard. A becoming modesty and a sense of humor, if not irony, also will not go amiss. Mere charm...