Word: bleakness
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...least, there are free parking lots, clean bathrooms and lots of places to get ice cream. It is a wonderful place to spend the summer. I look at gambling as a positive addition to Atlantic City's charm. It will probably do the same for the rather bleak landscapes in North Dakota where there is nothing else as exciting, and for suburban Connecticut where there is nothing but Yale...
From San Antonio to New York City's South Bronx, Kozol observes, inner-city schools are bleak fortresses with rotting classrooms and few amenities to inspire or motivate the young. A history teacher at East St. Louis' Martin Luther King Jr. High School, he notes, has 110 students in four classes, and only 26 books. Every year, says a teacher in a nearby school, "there's one more toilet that doesn't flush, one more drinking fountain that doesn't work, one more classroom without texts...
...that property levies have played in creating the vast educational gap between rich and poor. School trustees in the affluent Texas district of Glen Rose, for example, annually dole out $9,326 per pupil -- three times as much as the per-student allocation in the Rio Grande Valley's bleak Roma district. For reformers, the chief ally has been state courts, which have ruled in many cases -- Kentucky, Texas, New Jersey and Montana, for example -- that inequalities are unconstitutional. In Tennessee, 77 school districts asked a state court to take the same approach, and won. A similar suit has been...
Normality withers in this anthology, only to be reborn in grotesque form. The bleak life of a homeless woman is snuffed out through blind chance in "Zombies on Broadway," by Kaz, whose characters recall the hollow face and tortured body of the man in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." And woodcut figures ride the subway to self-immolation in the Village Voice's Mark Beyer's "The Unpleasant Subway...
...these stories cause you to suspect that the New Comics project a bleak portrait of reality--or alternate realities--you're right. Beauty does make an occasional appearance in these pages. But the thematic wholeness of this anthology stems from its hopelessness and nihilism...