Word: judgment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...known in his time that he is the only painter mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. Famous, and rather vulgar. If Raphael was the epitome of grace among artists of the High Renaissance and Michelangelo the paragon of sublimity, then Giulio was all licentious facility. So ran the judgment of our Victorian forebears, who could not quite forgive Raphael's best pupil for his indelicacy. An air of brilliant second- rateness still clings to his name. Those who can thrust their way through the crowds in Palazzo Te in Mantua and manage a long look at the enormous Giulio...
Even so, few are rushing to catch the next plane east. In Santa Cruz, near the epicenter of the quake, county officials are awaiting the judgment of geologists as to whether homeowners should be allowed to rebuild on the fractured hillsides, where landslides may now become a perennial headache. Many residents are nonetheless eager to rebuild. True to their reputation for mellowness and impregnable cool, Californians are generally unfazed by the fault-line threat...
...trap for facts. Capable of capturing high detail, operated with a minimum of human intervention, it seemed from the first to have a special purchase on the truth. William Henry Fox Talbot, the Englishman who was one of photography's inventors, was merely summing up what would become the judgment of the day when he called his new process the "pencil of nature...
...holds out hope that Prince Sihanouk willd be able to control the Khmer Rouge and effectively lead a democratic government in Phnom Penh. But the fact that he chooses to ally himself with a guerrilla group repulsive to the majority of Cambodians does not speak will of his political judgment. While Prince Sihanouk argues that the Khmer Rouge will continue fighting their guerilla war unless they are given some say in governing Cambodia, that hardly justifies negotiating with mass murderers...
Even so, the relative handling of the stories amounts to a blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling...