Word: exception
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tunis is quiet after midnight, when the phone rings. This is a Yasser Arafat tradition, summoning visitors at all hours to make their way through a gauntlet of steel barricades to a villa in a quiet residential corner of the city. The stucco house looks like any other, except that it is surrounded by young men in jeans, bearing Kalashnikovs, smoking cigarettes. Their job is to keep the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization alive -- and they take it seriously. Male guests are patted down, their pockets emptied, wallets searched. Women are scanned with ultrasensitive metal detectors, their purses % ransacked...
...that is part of what they call Eretz Yisrael, the land God gave to the Jews. The pressure from enemies only complicates an already knotty negotiation. When the two were alone with President Clinton just before the ceremony in Washington, Rabin recalls, ''Arafat and I didn't exchange anything, except I told him it's going to be very difficult to implement the accord. He said, 'I know.' '' Unlike many Israelis, Rabin has managed to accommodate his view of Arafat as a terrorist and a murderer with the belief that he is a man with whom Israel can do business...
...thought about democracy: peace is the worst mess, except for the alternative. For all that, these four men reasserted the principle that leaders matter: that an individual's vision, courageously and persuasively and intelligently pursued, can override the rather unimaginative human preference for war. If strong, focused leadership had come from Europe or from Washington, might it have averted the Bosnian bloodbath? If Jean-Bertrand Aristide were a Mandela -- and if he had some equivalent of De Klerk as partner on the other side -- could Haiti have been saved? No one can quantify a negative, but it seems obvious that...
Journalism can be a complicated business, and also very simple. We have long thought that one of the best ways to report what a major newsmaker thinks is one of the most obvious: just ask. With few exceptions (Hitler was otherwise engaged), we've done interviews with almost every Man or Woman of the Year in the past several decades. Some, of course, are easier than others. Our correspondent was expelled from Iran only days after his Man of the Year interview with the Ayatullah Khomeini (1979) was published, and we were able to print an interview with Solidarity leader...
...Except that this phony war has made "men" of them-if you define manhood in its most primitive form: as bonding on the basis of mutual sweating, swearing, swaggering under impossible conditions. But that, in its way, is the genius of this movie. Mendes, whose previous films (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) bear no resemblance to Jarhead, except in the well-calculated expertise of his direction-lots of handheld cameras in constant motion here-is totally non-judgmental, entirely unsentimental. Despite writing his book and seeing it made into this intense and absurdist movie, Swofford seems only to have taken...