Word: everydayness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps it is fitting that the Galbraithian phrase most permanently woven into the fabric over everyday life is "the conventional wisdom," which he defines as "the beliefs that are at any time assiduously, solemnly and mindlessly traded between the pretentiously wise." Galbraith's radar for the "conventional wisdom" always makes his observations ring with that extra measure of clarity. When he wrote in a recent edition of The New York Review of Books that "Solar energy attracts people with an indifferent commitment to personal hygience and a strong commitment to organic foods," the comment transcended mere economic analysis. Likewise, when...
Broadcast over some 1,700 ABC radio stations at 11:30:24 a.m. (E.D.T.) last Wednesday, that first word in the U.S. of the assassination attempt struck like a hammer. Once again, routines of everyday life were ruptured as millions of U.S. radio listeners, and an estimated 400 million TV viewers around the world, strained for further news from Rome. In the minutes that followed the first bulletin, CBS-TV, then ABC and NBC interrupted soap operas and game shows with special reports that echoed painfully in the memory. Journalists were dismayed by the similarity with the shooting of President...
...everyday maintenance tasks and other humdrum assignments facing new draftees, however, are not as easy to fill as when the forces were smaller. To help staff the jobs, the I.D.F. has begun to accept young people with criminal records, whom it once rejected. That has served to aggravate a decline in discipline, which bothers army commanders. Israeli troops have always been informal, but at the core they were tough and ready to fight. The new disregard of discipline has prompted the I.D.F. to emphasize symbols of obedience. Signs have gone up on military bases: SOLDIER, IMPROVE YOUR APPEARANCE...
...Kansas anymore. As thorough in his evocation of an Unreal City as both T.S. Eliot and Franz Kafka, Fellini creates an action-painting so surrealistic, so whirling, and so blinding that the ringing of an unseen telephone in several scenes seems an inexplicable and absurd reminder of everyday life...
...contingency and probability, where each speculative path opens onto a thousand new possibilities. Usually the mind penetrates only a few steps, looks nervously over its shoulder, then bolts back to the hard terrain of actuality. Luck is, by definition, mysterious, a force that may really be the clunkingly erratic, everyday version of the divine mind. Luck is God in a scatterbrained and even amoral mood, with his sense of justice out of commission. Or, agnostically, luck is the collision of the random with human biography; naturally, human intelligence resents and resists the inexplicable random, and so attributes it to imps...