Word: simpler
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...scene. Europe in the 18th century saw a vogue among painters and travelers for the Claude glass, an optical device that framed views in the manner of landscape painter Claude Lorrain and lent them something like his subdued tones. The Mediatheque functions in a similar way, but with even simpler means, aestheticizing a bit of nature simply by pointing us toward it just so. In a room where people will examine art on computer screens, reality becomes one more screen. As Scofidio likes to say, "It's the ultimate screensaver...
...Hardly anyone makes experimental movies today. Directors are afraid that, for even a moment, they will lose, addle or exasperate the audience. The wisdom from behind the megaphone is: Go bigger, go simpler. As a result, most American films are sitcoms, predictable from first reel to last. More precisely (in this era of Short Attention Span Cinema), they are commercials, peddling primitive stories with comfortable emotions. Today's typical filmmaker is a moneychanger in a fine old temple. And Altman, ostensibly the iconoclast, is actually the idealist, the conservative, keeping the faith, fighting to preserve what's best in movies...
...Things could become a lot more simpler in the coming months, however. Reliance Industries Limited, India's biggest conglomerate with interests in everything from oil refining to mobile phones, plans to open more than 2,000 supermarkets in the next two years. The company opened its first 11 stores in Hyderabad earlier this month and its first Delhi shops will open in a few weeks. These will be a lot smaller than a typical U.S. or European supermarket - no bigger in most cases than a large convenience store, although Reliance promises that much bigger supermarkets are in the pipeline...
DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years...
...correspondent, then enlisted in the Army and was sent to France. Writing home from Messines, he signed off: "Keep on remembering." Four days later, he was killed. "There were so many like him that we lost," Carlyon says. They belong to "a lost world, a world where people were simpler and braver and more generous of spirit. They talked about duty as if it meant something...