Word: questions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most likely to leave you talking to yourself. Making a quick phone call to ask a simple question? Forget it. Since the advent of voice mail (a.k.a. automated answering systems), there are no simple questions -- just a maze of electronic choices that could have been designed by Kafka. Got a medical emergency? Please push 1. Want something kinky? Press 4. Need to talk to a human? Just stay on the line...
...inspire, in addition to awe, suspense and admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens call, with increasing irony, anger and impatience, "Soviet reality." Gorbachev's determination to restructure that reality should induce Westerners to practice a kind of reverse engineering on the images in their own mind. The question of the hour should be not just, What next? but, Knowing what we know now, having seen what we have seen this year, how should we revise our understanding of the Soviet challenge...
...general, such American fresh thinking as there has been is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do to "help" Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can do to help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He has already done a lot, simply by presiding over a Soviet Union that is easier to see anew as a great big country with great big troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th century in one piece...
...West, and perhaps the West and East together, to manage the looming problems that will make the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it possible...