Word: bleakness
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...future in the pool is bright and his smile is winning, but Alexander Popov takes an austere, even bleak view of the world outside. The 100-m freestyle swimmer, who won the European championship last year, worries about Russia's future and takes an intensely frugal approach to life. "I look soberly on literally everything, even on girls. I am totally unromantic," he says...
Clinton was born at the bottom of the state, in its black belt, which has a bleak history. Twenty-five miles to the west, the state's most famous demagogue (Jeff Davis, named for the Confederate leader) was born, in a county (Little River) where more than a hundred freed blacks were murdered after the Civil War. About 25 miles south, a cemetery from early in the century was dug up, revealing African-American bones ravaged by the worst malnutrition recorded in this country. Hope is placed on stingy soil that raises, paradoxically, only large things: thick piney woods...
...near midnight, and Richard Price was stranded, notebook in hand, in the lobby of a bleak housing project with a surly crowd massing outside. Price had followed a cop who was chasing a drug dealer into the building, only to have them vanish up one of three stairways before he could see where they went. When an elderly woman appeared, Price desperately bluffed being a cop and demanded, "Where'd my partner go?" She could only stammer and stare. Finally the real officer returned, winded and empty-handed, and escorted the shaken writer safely through the crowd...
Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" is a pure joy to read. This is quite ironic considering that the title characters are named after two philosophers who had rather bleak views of human nature. The adventures of mischievous and precocious six years-old Calvin and his quiet, reflective, stuffed tiger Hobbes a not only capture a child-like sense of fun and adventure, but also at times see as social commentary. Watterson's recent leave of absence is understandable give his wonderful consistency. It must be imaginatively exhausting to continually come up with stuff this entertaining. Perhaps the strip...
...this was a prom that almost never was. Most of the 175 participants were in their 30s; they had missed the proms of their youth -- along with other adolescent rites of passage. Don't ask where they were at 18 or 21. The memories are too bleak, too fragmented to convey. They had organized this better-late-than-never prom to celebrate their remarkable "awakening" to reality after many years of being lost in the darkness of schizophrenia. The revelers were, in a sense, the laughing, dancing embodiments of a new wave of drug therapy that is revolutionizing...