Word: make
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Elections at the end of March mean that Putin has hardly enough time to make a serious mistake. A disaster in Chechnya could scar him, but his strategists are calculating that for the time being he has developed a Teflon coating. The biggest threat facing Putin, says Pavlovsky, is dramatically inflated popular expectations. Two and a half months of campaigning, however, allow little chance for Putin's 65% confidence ratings or popular expectations to be significantly deflated. There is also a slight possibility that Putin's views on anything, from economics to defense, will become much clearer in this time...
...idea, as ever, is to make people feel that they have to have purposeless merchandise they do not want. In a restaurant, a waiter will giddily announce, "We have mahi-mahi!" A sensible person would say, "So what?" America says, "I'll take...
...movies are mostly silly. Our books? Mostly small. The quality of our cultural criticism is generally so low that one cannot tell how good or bad any artist is, but in literature, at least, it is highly unlikely that any writer touted as a heavyweight in our era will make it to the ring in yours. Movies that once were judged by normal artistic criteria are now valued by the amount of money they make over a weekend. For your horrified amusement, see if you can dig up a print of something called Scream or The Blair Witch Project...
...Take a shot of Scotch, of red wine. Take a shot: vaccines are on the way soon that will prevent pneumonia, rheumatic fever, meningitis and the flu. There's a new prospect called regenerative medicine--using the body's own stem cells and growth factors to repair tissue. We make ourselves anew...
...America Inc. has become a term for describing the unending mergers of vast companies--multibillion-dollar mergers, real money today. Oil companies, car companies, food companies, banks; everything comes together. Media companies become telephone companies. Telephone companies become software companies. Book-publishing companies are swallowed whole by companies that make music, movies and magazines. Nothing is wrong with these adhesions in principle, but some "products," like books, suffer. Not long ago, the large book publishers would take on a number of excellent but unprofitable manuscripts as a kind of intellectual duty, pro bono work for the national mind. These days...