Word: bleakness
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...regarded as the country's secret weapon, the men who had overthrown the President of Afghanistan in his own palace and would strike deep inside Western Europe if a new world war broke out. This has changed. The most popular video in Russia last year was Schizophrenia. An unremittingly bleak portrayal of modern Russia, it tells the story of a Spetsnaz-type officer who is framed by the security police and then forced to assassinate a banker planning a run against the incumbent President. The officer carries out the murder and is later eliminated by state-security thugs. Many Russians...
Young-adult novels, as the genre used to be called, still center on disenfranchised adolescents who could be direct descendants of Holden Caulfield. Now, though, says Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher of Front Street Books, "the heat has been turned up." Front Street helped bring so-called bleak books to early teens in 1997 when it published one book set in a juvenile-detention facility (Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree) and another in which a 13-year-old sleeps with her mother's boss (Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves). They were followed by Melvin Burgess...
...kids' sports is undergoing a kind of privatization, with the most talented kids forgoing high school play altogether in favor of the elite travel clubs, the future of high school athletics could be bleak indeed. Dean Crowley, commissioner of athletics at the California Interscholastic Federation, points to the precarious position that sports programs already hold in many cash-strapped schools. "Pretty soon they might say, 'Why do we need to spend all the money we do on sports? These kids are playing all year round anyway.'" And then? "Then you don't have high school athletics." And then...
...disowned--are all in one way or another explorations of how minor mishaps can grow into major disasters, with the one exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which miscalculation leads to redemption, rebirth, a radiant transcendence of ordinary expectations. But Eyes Wide Shut, though it is finally less bleak in its moral implications than most Kubrick movies, is in the more typical line of a man perpetually disappointed by the world's failure to abide by his standards of logic and civility...
...that has so long dominated decision making in Russia has now spilled into foreign relations. And the fact that the Russian military was able to bypass most of the country's top civilian decision makers shows that Yeltsin has a new set of favorites--Russian army generals with a bleak view of the outside world and its designs...