The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.
"In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court," Toobin writes. "Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication."
Actress Mila Kunis, of the movie ‘Friends with Benefits,’ was asked if she thought such a relationship was possible. Her answer was insightful: ‘It’s like communism; good in theory, but in execution it fails.’
There is a suspicion that “The Tree of Life” could be — or should be, or really is — a touching coming-of-age story, and a similar sense that “The Future,” at bottom, is really just another funny-sad indie movie about a young couple navigating the conflicting demands of work, romance and the desire to be cool. Objecting to the presence of tender dinosaurs and talking cats reflects an impulse to keep these films inside familiar generic boxes. All manner of extravagant fantasy seems to be allowable in the commercial space of the multiplex — robots from outer space, time travel, magic and all the talking animals you want — but the art house is apparently the domain of the literal. We have been conditioned to expect independent movies, “serious” movies, not to venture beyond the horizon of ordinary life.
But why not connect the prose of existence to its deep, strange, cosmic implications? Why not suppose, for example, that attention to a particular boy’s life might entail wondering about the nature of life itself? And why not notice that a youngish couple’s apparently mundane quandaries and decisions — about work, sex, adopting a pet, becoming parents — are local instances of the mysteries that define the human condition? How do we exist in time? What are we supposed to do?
Deleveraging recessions last a long time, as shown by Rogoff and Reinhart. The need for continuing deleveraging implies that even a stimulus twice the size of ARRA won’t turn the tide.
In those cases a well-designed stimulus program should not be so “timely.” For a given presented expected value sum spent on stimulus, it is better to spread it out across the years. It is better to help a smaller set of workers for five years (or however many years it takes for most of the deleveraging to end), after which they are reemployable , than to temporarily boost a larger number of workers for two years, and then leave them back in the dust because deleveraging is still going on.
"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets," the authors write.
it's really remarkable, in fact, how often the aliens in science fiction just happen to be preoccupied with the exact same political issues that obsessed intellectuals of the era when the fiction was written. And yet it's still somehow breathtaking. They don't even notice that they're not noticing all their embedded assumptions. For example, the scientists do not even consider the possibility that the recent decline in church attendance among the citizens of the world's most powerful nations could be a signal to advanced, god-fearing aliens that we are a decadent and irreligious species who should be wiped out.
The less told story on such subsidies is what they have done to generate more demand and push up prices, he says. “One the one hand you are actually getting all your subsidies, but you are actually paying more for the property you would have liked to consume,” says Acharya. “Therefore the real subsidy goes only [to those] at the very top. It is for people who are buying a second house. It is for people who are buying more land than they would otherwise.”
In some ways, President Obama’s Middle Eastern foreign policy does for President Bush’s democratization policy what President Eisenhower did for President Truman’s containment doctrine. In both cases, a necessary and useful foreign policy had become deeply unpopular; Eisenhower implemented containment but made the country feel better about it — partly by rhetorical shifts, partly by tweaking the execution. Obama is trying to do the same thing with Bush’s transformation agenda.
His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.
I maintain canonical standards for the study and appreciation of literature. I practice philology and knowledge of the history of language. I do not give in to political considerations, however they mask themselves. All this business about gender, social class, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation is nonsense. I'm 81. I'm not prepared to temporise any more. I've been prophesying like Jeremiah since 1968, warning the profession that it was destroying itself. And it has. There are fewer and fewer people teaching English, or any other kind of literature, in American universities. Students don't wish to study garbage and that's all they're offered.
We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don't mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They're like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I'm willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide.
“The press,” Rosenthal wrote, “treats it all as some kind of cultural clash between a poverty-ridden people fed up with life and a powerful, prosperous and unfortunately peculiar bunch of stuck-up neighbors — very sad of course, but certainly understandable. No — it is an anti-Semitic pogrom and the words should not be left unsaid.”
Despite yesterday's upswing, it has been reported that about $1 trillion in on-paper losses have occurred on Wall Street in the past month. That's a hunk of cash, and it wipes out many of the gains investors had recouped since the tech bubble burst in 2001 and the mortgage crisis took the market down in 2009.
For a decade now, I have contended that long-term investing just doesn't work anymore, that big-time day traders are buying and selling the same stocks two or three times a day and manipulating the market.
And in that instant, at that Japanese restaurant, Barry Zito might have in fact been very happy. He might have believed that everything that Scott Boras' computer had predicted would come true. He might have believed that he would finish his career in Cooperstown.
Instead, in the coming days and months and years, all that weight, all that expectation, all that godforsaken math, it pushed Barry — Barry, not Zito — off his delicate and particular balance. Those numbers meant that he would never again be consciously unconscious. He would never again be able to feel his way through his life; now he could only calculate the value of it, when all people ever had to do was watch him throw his curveball and they would know exactly what he was worth.
That's the real tragedy of Barry Zito. It's not that he was reduced to a mathematical proof in the winter of 2006. It's that in the summer of 2011, he has become one: Sometimes the sum of faith and belief and love still isn't nearly enough.
No, Klinsmann understands that the problem with American soccer is simple. We don't play enough pickup . From orange slice leagues on, our talent development is programmatic and over-coached. The U.S. national team is plenty athletic—physical fitness and toughness are our calling cards—but woefully devoid of magic. Of vision and creativity. Of the things that can't be taught. Our nation produces great, gritty goalkeepers. We never have produced a Pele.
Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
If you think of Barack Obama as a charismatic president, it is hard to explain why his supporters are so angry. He should be able to win them over. But if you understand his appeal as glamour, then his problems aren’t surprising.
With glamour, any specific action that stands outside the fantasy breaks the spell, alienating supporters who disagree. Even trying to remain above the fray, as Obama often does, infuriates those who want a fighter.
A well-established sales tool, glamour is a tremendous asset if you’re running for office. But once you have to govern, it’s a problem. Although charisma can continue to inspire, glamour is guaranteed to disillusion. The only thing surprising about Obama’s predicament is how few people expected it.