Word: somehow
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...people living in an unruffled commune, the symbiosis of modern man and primal nature. And if these attractions don't give you a high, then the free dope will--it sprouts like kudzu all over the place. Now Richard, the narrator of the book and film The Beach, has somehow reached this ideal island in Thailand, this littoral dream made literal. But Utopia isn't good enough for Richard, because he's questing, he's weak, he's ornery...he's Leonardo DiCaprio...
...least of the triumphs of Nicholas Shakespeare's unimprovable (and unstoppably readable) Bruce Chatwin (Doubleday; 618 pages; $35) is that it looks unflinchingly at the vanities, lies and manipulations of a "heroically selfish" man and yet somehow makes him plausibly sympathetic. To understand is to forgive, they say in France, and by poring through the unpublished notebooks of both Chatwin and his friends, by talking to seemingly everyone who knew him and by training his novelist's urbanity on all this, Shakespeare shows how the dandified collector of odd treasures could honestly mooch off duchesses while maintaining that one should...
PANGLOSS POWER Here's something to really smile about. A 30-year study shows that folks with a positive perspective live 19% longer than pessimists. How this might work is not clear, but it may be that an optimistic attitude somehow strengthens the immune system or simply inspires people to take better care of themselves. In the study, the optimists were happy to credit themselves when things went right, and they tended to view crises as fleeting. Pessimists, on the other hand, were chronic self-blamers. Most of us are, no doubt, a bit of both...
...American elite 25 years from now won't charge an admission price exactly; still, business success will be its way of assuring itself that an applicant has what it takes to become a member. Those who haven't hit it big as entrepreneurs will somehow seem to have talents that are merely peripheral. The qualities that the elite respects will be a kind of aggressive and even ruthless energy and imagination. Superpromising young people will set themselves on a course to become David Geffen, not Dean Acheson...
McCain, who, with characteristic optimism, is calling Michigan a "must-win," is fuming over Bush's onslaught of negative ads in recent weeks. Whatever the reasons for McCain's loss in South Carolina, Saturday probably marked the beginning of the end for his surprising and somehow beguiling crusade. It remains to be seen whether McCain - who was adversarial and at times bitter in his concession speech - can find a way to rescue the effort...