Word: mereness
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...first we were inclined to think of the tale of the teacher and her sixth-grade lover as mere daytime-television trash in the flesh--the teacher-pupil angle slipping a ghost of incest into the narrative, and no doubt a touch of mental illness. On the other hand, we have gone pretty far in exhausting the categories of the forbidden. The love that dare not speak its name has become public, ordinary and settled into domestic life, as wholesome as Fred MacMurray in a cardigan. The President's penis and its recreations are routinely discussed in public without much...
...oddly, scandal and trash may sometimes be transformed upward. Mere sleaze may blossom into art. Greek tragedy told stories more lurid than afternoon television does. (Next Jerry Springer: "Guys who murdered their fathers and married their mothers.") The tale of Mary Letourneau and the boy Vili even begins to touch us now with a certain screwball Romeo-and-Juliet poignancy. There's an interesting humanity in the tale, an aberrance with something almost sweet about...
Alas, there's something different in the air this fundraising season. It's no secret that the Harvard Radcliffe relationship has been a bit strained lately. And it's been clear for some time that this is no mere marital spat. Radcliffe alumnae opened (or reopened) the battle last year by taking Harvard to task for the low percentage of women in its tenured faculty. They implied that if Harvard women want to help Harvard women, they'd do better to donate to Radcliffe than to stuff the coffers of the old boys club...
Hunting down the genes that influence personality remains a dauntingly difficult business. Although DNA is constructed out of a mere four chemicals--adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine--it can take as many as a million combinations to spell out a single human gene. Most of these genes vary from individual to individual by only one chemical letter in a thousand, and it is precisely these minute differences that Hamer and his colleagues are trying to identify. Of particular interest are variations that may affect the operation of such brain chemicals as dopamine and serotonin, which are well-known modulators of mood...
...redemption (or at least responsible adulthood) for his wayward protagonist. We don't believe it for a second. We do, however, believe in the talent of his actors. The vengeful women--a coolly elegant Heather Graham and a flat-voiced, sharp-minded Natasha Gregson Wagner--are more than mere accompanists to Downey's tour de force; they're full-scale partners, finding arresting dissonances in this unfinished chamber piece...