Word: context
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...inside the city's Usher Hall the conductor Gustavo Dudamel is having difficulty with the strings. It is the final rehearsal of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, and Dudamel wants the violins to be more biting and caustic. Any successful performance of Shostakovich's 10th must reflect its historical context: Stalin's purges; some 20 million dead; a composer who lived in constant fear of the knock on the door. "Muchachos," Dudamel says, searching for the right expression. "Pop pop pop!" he says, mimicking the sound of a firing squad...
...CONTEXT Banished from pubs and offices, bored smokers find themselves filling the minutes by tapping out wireless messages. Experts have dubbed the new activity "smexting." The practice is so popular that British cell-phone company Orange reported a surge of 7.5 million messages sent during the first two weeks of July, just after smoking was banned from indoor public places in England...
...think of special schools for gymnasts or tennis prodigies as élitist--a charge already leveled against the Davidson Academy. But giftedness on the playing field and giftedness in, say, a lab aren't so different. As Columbia education professor Abraham Tannenbaum has written, "Giftedness requires social context that enables it." Like a muscle, raw intelligence can't build if it's not exercised...
...CONTEXT Colleges justify the fees, sometimes as high as $500 a semester, by citing the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields and the difficulties of getting general tuition increases past state legislatures...
...expected, at least in a practice context, it would have been more of a competition," Murphy said. "But Liam was clearly the best guy in practice...