Word: bleakness
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...years ago. In 1972, following in his parents' footsteps, Richard Leakey discovered a nearly complete manlike skull at nearby Lake Rudolf in Kenya that is at least 2.6 million years old. More recently, Carl Johanson of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, digging in Ethiopia's bleak Awash Valley, discovered a manlike jawbone that seems to be well over 3 million years old (TIME, Dec. 2, 1974). If all these creatures are in fact close kin, they would, in Mary Leakey's words, be people "not unlike ourselves," though not much more than 5 ft. tall...
Despite this advantage, however, the military situation remains bleak. The MPLA faces hostile forces on all sides which are generally better armed and better trained. In particular it is the approaching battle with the FNLA for Luanda which should determine Angola's fate. The question is whether popular forces relying on revolutionary social institutions can hold off the technically superior armies seeking to prevent the Angolan people from determining their own destiny. National liberation movements have been victorious elsewhere facing less favorable odds; there is no reason to think it could not happen in Angola...
Brecht's vision is a bleak one. Man, it seems, must plough a course between the Scylla of nature and the Charybdis of conformity to the powers that be. Allegorically speaking, the hapless tutor must renounce his sexual desires for good if he is to continue tutoring young ladies. But while his self-mutilation debars him permanently from natural enjoyment, it earns him only the temporary approbation of the authorities, leaving him ultimately at their mercy. At the end of the play, the tutor doffs his persona and steps forward to explain, for those who might have missed...
...landscape is bleak. But the Bicentennial finds some thoughtful Americans seeking a renewed sense of covenant and virtue, even though the concept embarrasses many. Few speak of moral progress or Utopian hopes in a moment like ours. Yet it is possible that today too little is made of those rare virtues that we do possess. The Catholic bishops' committee that came to scold stayed also to praise. "Many of the new emphases are positive and praiseworthy: sensitivity to the dignity and fundamental equality of all men and women; increased concern for individual self-realization; broadened perception of the moral...
...play traps its four characters on a Greyhound bus. and each character is leaving behind a forgettable past, while moving toward some future just as bleak. This kind of atmosphere doesn't exactly lend itself to dramatic action; the play is more a series of monologues spliced onto each other with cement of dubious quality (one character rambles on, then concludes with a key word that the next character picks...