Dropping your pretensions to stuff your face with cheese and dough only makes you even more aware of how stupid those pretensions were to begin with.
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Grant underplays savage battles to escape the pretensions of heroic rhetoric; Adams overdramatizes his internal "lessons" to mock the earnest pretensions of intellect to master the commercial world.
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Thankfully, few of these pretensions exist in the pin game.
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Its characters are enjoyably silly in their pretensions and eccentricities.
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I used to disparage goji berries as raisins with pretensions.
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He played sarcastic, cutting his sons' pretensions down to size.
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The United States should start by shedding its old pretensions.
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And its lack of pretensions — it's beautiful, but not fussy.
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She clearly doesn't suffer fools, and enjoys pricking actorly pretensions.
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They are here to puncture, if you will, humanity's pretensions.
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Compared with the system's ambitions and pretensions, it was as nothing.
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Because he is from the elite but doesn't have its pretensions?
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It is not, and it has no pretensions of being so.
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"How I despised her, with her preposterous literary pretensions!" she wrote.
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It's literature, but without the lengthy descriptions and pretensions to importance.
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Quigley is worse from the French-boudoir pretensions of her brothel.
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By contrast, conservatives are suspicious of all revolutionary pretensions to universal truth.
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Even the professional class likes to eye-roll at its own pretensions.
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But beyond finance and economics, the EU has traditionally had few pretensions.
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Supporting characters were deployed to balance out the brothers' most excessive pretensions.
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Burr had none, Hamilton declared — Jefferson at least had pretensions to them.
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Kiarostami asked questions, but he had no pretensions of having the answers.
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Above all, Souza's reflections weaved a story of a presidency without pretensions.
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So when he mounted the stage at the Aspen Institute and told his fellow fellows that their pretensions of doing good were just that — pretensions — and that they were more the problem than the solution, it caused some controversy.
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There is something refreshing about this willingness to subvert the pretensions of artistry.
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Gerald Foos had literary and scientific pretensions, but he had no self-awareness.
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Yet he has pretensions to grandiosity that far outstrip the art of the possible.
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"We have a responsibility if we have pretensions to be proper journalists," she explains.
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But because it is so big, China refutes America's pretensions to run the world.
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If it should fall, IS's pretensions to being a state will fall with it.
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Unhindered by other pretensions, however, it marks a brilliant new phase in Theron's career.
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They were free-spirited enough to make fun of art and all its pretensions.
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And he has a healthy disrespect for the pretensions and conventional wisdom of fashion.
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He didn't want the pretensions — the ego, the angst — left over from Abstract Expressionism.
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Martin Luther has become infamous for completely altering European history; Skaryna had no such pretensions.
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I know I'm a figure of fun and that some detest me for imagined pretensions.
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Indeed, its pretensions of caliphate destroyed, ISIS is today a shell of its former self.
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The schedule reflects a continuing commitment to jazz outreach at street level, with few pretensions.
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Kick them in their social pretensions, though, and you could bring tears to their eyes.
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Unlike Apple Watches or Google Goggles, Fluxa makes no pretensions to being a fashionable accessory.
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It's the old vagina dentata scare show, this time fancied up with art-house pretensions.
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The larrikin is irreverent and jocular, ready to challenge hierarchy and upend class-based pretensions.
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Under the pretensions of justice, it causes unnecessary turmoil and confusion in the body politic.
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His voice hang glides, allergic to gravity, scorning your "useless pretensions" and lack of substance.
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The pretensions of Qatar's ruling Al Thani family to global grandeur have also vexed other rulers.
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The artist has no pretensions, and he doesn't have any big dreams of changing the world.
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Despite the Arab League's pretensions to brotherhood, visa-free travel among its 22 countries is unusual.
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" Yet Jefferson "is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character . . .
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Well, it's curious though, that as governments pretensions and solicitousness have grown, its prestige has plummeted.
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Diane needed, temperamentally and philosophically, to poke through pretensions and masks to expose the hidden truth.
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Baghdadi had pretensions to be a "caliph" and run a state, something bin Laden never tried.
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But Quick sometimes seems to mock Nanette's pain and pretensions in a way that feels meanspirited.
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In the gallery that day, my pretensions of having become more cultivated and metropolitan were punctured.
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The Gray references, both linked to LaVerdere, are (I think) meant to indicate LaVerdere's artsy pretensions.
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Like an irreverent Greek chorus, they laugh at human pretensions and encourage people to feel nothing.
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Just because it's the summer doesn't mean you can let all pretensions go out the window.
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". He later described trade unionists as "tyrants, whose selfish and sectional pretensions need to be bravely opposed.
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Townsend was never unkind to her characters: there is no condescension in her description of teenage pretensions.
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Despite our pretensions as budding masters of the universe, we remain misshapen cogs in the cosmic machine.
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Playing Sasha's celebrity squeeze, Reeves has enormous fun spoofing his action-movie persona and pricking Hollywood pretensions.
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He could be a useful irritant, unafraid of kicking up at the pretensions of the literary establishment.
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In other words, "Legion" has abandoned many of its pretensions and become a more straightforward superhero story.
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Now we all gawp at these paintings, tsk-tsk their misogyny and dismiss the salon's spiritual pretensions.
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The miniature park's pretensions to utopia are undercut by how it looks: like a wilting, crumbling non-place.
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The good news is that Shadow abandons Rise's lofty conspiracy thriller pretensions for a tighter, character-focused story.
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For prog artists with lofty pretensions to high art, "middlebrow" may be the most stinging insult of all.
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One of her less lovely efforts is a satirical assault on the religious pretensions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
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It's a brazen, ghoulish murder-fest, as twisted and amoral as its heroes, and has no pretensions otherwise.
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Again your pal Dan's bedroom wall is way too soft for a structure that has pretensions to solidity.
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Pretensions to certainty can be seductive, eking out a temporary tactical advantage, but their victories are often brittle.
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The fact that war and imperial pretensions are inherent to Vladimir Putin's project has profound repercussions throughout Eurasia.
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In this novel of midlife collapse, Houellebecq reprises his attack on the ideological pretensions of contemporary Western society.
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Such pretensions to reality-creating grandeur, Latour suggests, amount to little more than a vulgar, self-defeating cynicism.
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Design snobs, coffee snobs, wellness snobs, people with pretensions of all sorts — you can make it happen for them.
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China's pretensions to being a superpower will look hollow as long as America can throttle its firms at will.
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The Edge of Democracy is not an impartial piece of journalistic filmmaking; indeed, Costa makes no pretensions to objectivity.
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I have always thought it was a brilliant work, simultaneously celebrating the possibilities of sculpture and deflating its pretensions.
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And he intuited that politics, for all its precious norms and pretensions, was at its root a blood sport.
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Lome has pretensions toward becoming a miniature Singapore and hosts offices of several multinational companies including Ecobank and airline ASKY.
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She does so against the backdrop of Silicon Valley wealth and pretensions, perfectly skewering its (and our) culture of excess.
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The subtext is widely understood: whatever India's pretensions to being a secular state, effective power lies with its Hindu majority.
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Adlon doesn't ask us to run with Sam's pretensions—she has none—she just asks us to recognize her selfhood.
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Nobody really looks to a Corolla for sporty handing, although the "S" trim from the previous generation had those pretensions.
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And in terms of food, the pub classics are all available, done very well with little to no gourmet pretensions.
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He accuses Washington of waging "economic war" on Venezuela and harboring coup pretensions aimed at gaining control over its oil.
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If Mr. D'Ambrose doesn't quite earn his pretensions, it's refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.
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The show isn't a tragedy — most of the time, it's a satirical (though quite violent) culture-clash caper with pretensions.
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But this elevation of the idea of design was arguably also the beginning of the end of its social pretensions.
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Patterson's art tills curious notions of time and passage without the usual pretensions that accompany this sort of subject matter.
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The eighteenth century's pretensions to Enlightenment ended at the Tyburn scaffold, where wretches were publicly hanged for stealing a purse.
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"Jay is something of a fop, but we forgive him his pretensions and his résumé inflation," Floyd said to Charlie.
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The two characters, in some ways, had the most obviously fictional functions on a show with pretensions of gritty realism.
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Rollins has no pretensions about his talents as an actor nor much discrimination about the roles he chooses to take on.
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The most cynical see a marketing exercise, rebranding everything that China does abroad under slogans that flatter Mr Xi's global pretensions.
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Baker's work can be about letting time — and the pretensions of art world — drop away, as we turn to the ordinary.
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In Hama's hands, the G.I. Joe comic universe subtly deflated America's military pretensions, putting the individual soldier before any national zeitgeist.
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For a town that's all about the hot new scene, this place has no pretensions, and its clientele is the same.
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"Bester's headdress appears like a costume that undermines the pretensions of portraiture," the art historian Tamar Garb wrote in the book.
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Later, in bed, Robin, played with brisk pretensions of authority by Michael Cristofer, shrugs off her concerns with something like contempt.
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Such pretensions to absolute power are unfounded and antithetical to the foundational principles of limited and balanced government in the Constitution.
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Ahead of Monday night's debate, both participants were under pressure to tone down the matinee idol pretensions and blend into the background.
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Uncomfortably clunky and didactic writing undermine some of Radio Commander's pretensions to being a game with Important Things to Say About War.
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The local participants and audience members at the festival betrayed few pretensions, but there was an unquestionably sincere vibe throughout the weekend.
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And where the port city's champions see a swaggering no-nonsense metropolis free of bourgeois pretensions, others see a lack of refinement.
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Unlike David's Napoleon, Mr. Wiley's Napoleon is as teasing as it is heroic, and lightly queers the masculine pretensions of military painting.
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For all of Silicon Valley's pretensions of being arbiters of free speech, these companies are fundamentally incapable of shaping a healthy public discourse.
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In 1973 Loriot, West Germany's most incisive humourist, chose it for the title of an anthology of cartoons skewering his country's bourgeois pretensions.
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You, me, Gary Lineker – we are all as bad as each other, able to suspend our ethical pretensions or our disbelief when necessary.
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That clunky observation is meant to clue us in to this self-regarding movie's literary pretensions, gleaned perhaps from some misbegotten writers' workshop.
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He and his cohort then killed about two million people, with special focus on anyone with foreign connections, foreign blood, or intellectual pretensions.
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Taino Smokehouse lets you dispense with fine-dining pretensions and get down to the tool kit and pickup truck pleasures of smoked meats.
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An etching of a skeleton wearing a fancy French hat sent up the pretensions of rich Mexicans who tried to pass for European.
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Pure Land Buddhism does not want us to give up our moral lives, but to give up the pretensions that often accompany them.
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Myths tend to celebrate grandeur and heroic superiority; parables tend to puncture the pretensions of superiority and celebrate humility and service to others.
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It is easier to like "Feast of the Epiphany" as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.
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Farcical without being funny, "How I Won the War" is emphatically irreverent in mocking Winston Churchill along with the pretensions of the British Empire.
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But, and it was rarely clear whether or not this was Cubitt's intention, there was a certain hollowness at the core of Spector's pretensions.
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"Grace" An altogether more lurid experience is offered by Pun Homchuen and Onusa Donsawai's "Grace," a Thai slasher movie with pretensions to social commentary.
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As powerful leaders in China, Russia, India, Japan and elsewhere are energetically promoting their own fractured takes on their history, he punctures their pretensions.
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Today, the charcoal drawings are a testament to how Gilbert & George worked to soften the preening pretensions of Conceptualism in the British art scene.
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In cutting Scott, he goes beyond a mere lack of affectation into positive derision, mocking the pretensions of the refined society that mocked him.
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It helps that Eccleston's Matt gets to play off long-running "Leftovers" characters who know him well and can puncture some of his pretensions.
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You won't find any pretensions about contemplating the beauty of a crack in the wall: these well-loved spaces are also well lived-in.
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Through the little green eyes of Billy Pilgrim's Tralfamadorian captors, we see ourselves as mere human beings, mortal animals utterly stripped of our pretensions.
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A zine is a homemade magazine — it's what you did if you lived in a small town and had some pretensions to cultural importance.
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The collection had the infectious energy and cheer of a Pixar swap shop, and no pretensions to grandeur (which has a worth of its own).
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Now that he is on his second album under his own namesake, the orchestrated neofolk offering Eye for an Eye, all pretensions are stripped away.
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His efforts to establish himself as a Jarvis Cocker of the Snapchat set continue as he makes note of others' pretensions and deprecates his own.
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With her typical acerbic wit, Ms Cusk skewers the pretensions of the literary world while simultaneously upholding the intrinsic value of literature—no small feat.
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But the coif is magnificent, an exposed ego of an updo that communicates all the shoestring pretensions of the world Eugene and Jane occupy together.
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A B-movie director with artistic pretensions, he drowns his fears of mediocrity in drugs, alcohol and whichever woman happens to be closest to him.
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Like the clowns he shared the town square with, a good charlatan could often juggle, simultaneously keeping up pretensions to scientific rigor and mystical profundity.
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Mr. Morris wrote the script, which is full of the pretensions, posturing, mythologizing and hokiness that will always be part of the religion of theater.
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For many carmakers, especially those that offer vehicles with sporting pretensions, paddle shifters are sort of the automotive equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.
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Why was I even in such a room with a man who looked like he did, had hair and socks and pretensions as he did?
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In a series of skillfully executed set pieces, Rosenfeld skewers the pretensions and preoccupations of women for whom "parent" is both verb and competitive sport.
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"We are the prisoners of a very dubious set of pseudo-scientific pretensions that are part of the people who manage our monetary affairs," he added.
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Bring it all together in a way that skewers any pretensions the subject might have to probity, and gratifies the reader by confirming all their prejudices.
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It started with Karl Marx, who in "The German Ideology" cast all intellectuals as "ideologists" whose job is to rationalize the pretensions of the ruling class.
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Throughout, the writer-director-producer team of Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, and Peter Rida Michail mock genre clichés and the pretensions of comic book super-heroics.
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Crews has been debunking Freud's scientific pretensions for decades now; and it seems fair to ask what keeps driving him back to stab the corpse again.
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The supernatural element short-circuits Lanthimos's pretensions of tragedy, and after its electrifying first hour, Killing loses it spark and narrows to a series of gruesome scenes.
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"Come on, this fig leaf is so easily seen through, so easily blown aside that it leaves the constitutional pretensions of my Republican colleagues naked," he added.
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Runway fashion, with very few exceptions, exists in a state of permanent seriousness; drag sends it up mercilessly, worshiping its extremes while mocking its pretensions with impunity.
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Lupe Fiasco: Drogas Wave (1st & 15th) It's pretentious to complain that this musically agile, intellectually ambitious rapper has undertaken a concept trilogy that doesn't justify its pretensions.
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We must also consider whether efforts to diversify the field are stymied by our pretensions and by 19th century definitions for what Classics is or is not.
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A dinner party at Latta's home is a well-produced and generous affair, and there is only one proviso: All pretensions must be checked at the door.
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The Pour POMEROL, France — The word Bordeaux connotes magnificent chateaus, aristocratic (or at least wealthy or corporate) landowners and wines that occasionally live up to their pretensions.
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Miranda was by then the sort of woman who called the Pinnacle Club the Pineapple Club; she could ridicule Southern pretensions even as she conceded to them.
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It tells you more about the pretensions and anxieties and intentions of the person making the comparison than it does about the subject of the comparison itself.
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Shunned by the world, ISIS "citizens" would have been unable to travel on them but they show the degree to which this organization had pretensions to statehood.
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Although Soviet communist ideology had universal pretensions, Putin's legitimacy rests on a narrower but, for his neighbors, no less problematic motive: the revival of the Russian empire.
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But as the episodes wear on (the first two, evocatively directed by Jeremy Saulnier, air Sunday), they become more dour, and some of the old pretensions return.
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" Eventually, the bright colors fade and a hardness settles in; life is transformed into geology, "a trace of volcanic activity cooled down with pretensions of eternity, stable, fixed.
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"I Know" suggests a sneering put-down of a rival band's pretensions, while "San Andreas Fault Line Blues" belongs to the ageless category of Los Angeles disillusionment narratives.
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In the meantime, if you're a future Ivy Leaguer with pretensions to being the spiciest memelord of all time: It's probably best to keep the memes PG-13.
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James wants to undermine the scientific pretensions of people who, like his brother, think that human psychology can be a science, rather than an enigmatic, unfolding experiential art.
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On Kafka, Dauber argues that his subversive comedy is distinctly Jewish because it mocks the pretensions of scientific certainty that papers over the irrational forces controlling our lives.
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" Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate, predicted that Mr. Hickenlooper would appeal to primary voters because "he does not have a lot of pretensions.
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But Wilder's humor is on point when it comes to skewering the pretensions of Long Island's upper class; this is as sharp and wry as romantic comedy gets.
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Davis and Fisher poke fun at the pretensions of young folks in their late 20s and early 30s, and they riff some on the stereotype of the steely assassin.
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As the world's presumptive titans, the G-22019, start to gather in China, Trump exposes their globalist pretensions in an age rising instead to populism, devolution, decentralization and nationalism.
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The stunt was set up for the purposes of the farmer-owned food brand's latest commercial, which is meant to highlight the pretensions of hip big-city coffee culture.
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And the sporty pretensions of the SE and XSE model seemed more like a trim and styling exercise than a genuine attempt to produce a flat-cornering performance sedan.
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A reason to stick around: Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions.
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Indeed, his pretensions at being just a such a reformer—allowing women to drive, opening cinemas—are what particularly endeared him to a broad, even bipartisan swath of Washington.
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It's almost comforting knowing that we are in the able, busy hands of a veteran journeyman with few pretensions to subtlety, scene-painting and the stately march of history.
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"I want to say book collecting is fun; serious fun possibly, but always an antidote to the idiocies of life and the pretensions of academia," he wrote in 2008.
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The heavier the bottles, the more people would be willing to pay for them: This equation seems to be accepted in marketing departments worldwide, wherever aspirations evolve into pretensions.
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YEAR OF THE MONKEYBy Patti Smith Patti Smith is a funky original, an authentic bohemian whose pretensions to poetry were ratified by her solid instincts for rock 'n' roll.
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Frum relishes going on the attack, and he castigates members of a Republican establishment who have laid any pretensions to moral rectitude on the altar of a tax cut.
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The "Carry On" films traded in seaside-postcard smut while taking pot-shots at the pretensions of the British professional classes ("Carry On Doctor" is a masterpiece of doctor-deflation).
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In past writing on Balthus, I've insisted on his hebephilia, countering the long and enabling piety of art people who have endorsed his pretensions to aristocratic nobility and spiritual mysticism.
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Noting the Parisian pretensions of the characters in "The Cosmopolitans," Ms. Young and Mr. Stillman said emphatically that Paris wasn't exactly home for them, but it was certainly home base.
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Arranged for voice and piano and pared down to human size, this anthem of triumphant liberation was stripped of operatic pretensions to become an approachable, touching expression of self-realization.
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But her most successful novels took place in the Midwest and turned the scope of literature away from away from what Norris calls "overrefined... European pretensions" and toward ordinary people.
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As the title suggests, El Royale — a motor lodge with pretensions of grandeur, which seems like an apt metaphor for this movie — isn't a place for a good night's sleep.
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This was the most amusing and thought-provoking version of "The Music Man" I had seen in ages, often unpretentious despite its pretensions, cleverly costumed and full of new ideas.
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Mild humor about the micronation's pretensions to real statehood seems especially vaporous on the imposing set (by Andrew Boyce) and amid the foreboding ocean roar of Jane Shaw's sound design.
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He "touched" those 1.7 million files to show that he could: that the N.S.A.'s pretensions to secrecy were an arbitrary mechanism doing something unnatural and therefore could be circumvented.
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"Comedian" is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Cattelan's decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier art.
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The loans had been taken out under "false pretensions" which were "supported by valueless securities", he told the court and were then not spent how the bank had been told.
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There's a faded, nostalgic quality to the art, which evokes both an earlier era of bohemian pretensions and the way in which that era has become mythologized by later generations.
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In contrast, and despite their "anti-elite" pretensions, many cometicians "punch down", identifying with the majority by making fun of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, often underprivileged minorities.
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Though the designers can get caught up in their artistic pretensions, here the sheer craftiness of the exercise grounded their more overblown tendencies and made for a charming, thought-provoking result.
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Harvard has the right to consider factors that are not purely quantitative, but its moral pretensions may be tarnished as we learn more about the true factors in its admissions decisions.
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"The expedition started out with the usual scientific pretensions," said Jens Glüsing, a longtime correspondent in Brazil for the German magazine Der Spiegel who wrote a book about the Guyana Project.
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I had no ideological pretensions; I merely wanted the Baltic States and all of Scandinavia, and I didn't want to fight the United States or Germany if I could help it.
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The intimate nature of her writings, displaying a fascinating lack of aesthetic pretensions, are best suited to readers already familiar with her visual art or those who are curious about it.
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Still, even those who wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks in June can't get to one fast enough in the fall, when everyone drops their pretensions for the pumpkin spice latte.
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Its vast literary pretensions juggled so many balls that it will take a truly inspired team of writers not to drop any should a sequel, a third Half-Life proper, finally emerge.
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When in 1954 Kingsley Amis published Lucky Jim—perhaps the most widely read contribution to the genre—conventional wisdom held that the campus was a place of intellectual pretensions and retrograde hierarchies.
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While making no pretensions to any definitive answer, Curry's hour-long film orbits this question like a moon around one of the innumerable alien world's conjured by Le Guin in her fiction.
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Its soapy satire is aiming to skewer the city's vegans, desperate actors, and therapy devotees — just as it took aim at New York's literary pretensions and self-centered heiresses in Season 1.
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Except for its scenes involving animals, this handsome, excessively fastidious screen adaptation of Diane Ackerman's 2007 nonfiction best seller is a polite but pallid recycling of Holocaust movie tropes with epic pretensions.
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Stalking Ines' life and all over her social calendar, Winfried's fool is just the tonic required, skewering the pretensions of the suits while forcing Ines to embrace her own quashed sense of silliness.
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Elected to the Palestinian Authority presidency for a four-year term in 2005, he has refused to hold another election, choosing to remain in office and make a mockery of Palestinian democratic pretensions.
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" Unlike his sister, Gretchen, a nonprofit do-gooder convinced that corporate workers just haven't found their calling, Henry claims to love office life, which provides "money's comforts" and the "nobility of no pretensions.
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It eventually led to the monstrosity of Marxism-Leninism, with its pretensions to infallibility ("scientific socialism"), its delight in obfuscation ("dialectical materialism") and its cult of personality (those giant statues of Marx and Lenin).
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For all its highbrow pretensions—one artist, Dan Bejar, refuses to discuss Taylor Swift in an interview because it "brings down [his] poem to a level that's too mundane"—Pitchfork often spouts generic puffery.
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As soon as they get their discharge, the pressure on the former soldiers is really turned on, and it's time to cast off the frivolities of the young, which includes any pretensions to creativity.
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As wary of highbrow pretensions as he is of commercial moviemaking and its co-option of a once-rebellious youth culture, he has often sought originality in the cracks between high and low genres.
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The endlessly dissected 603 cover story "Kevin Spacey Has a Secret," written with grand New Journalism pretensions, was widely viewed as a clumsy attempt to "out" Mr. Spacey, who compared the article to McCarthyism.
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A lovely dig at Hindu vegetarian pretensions follows as the father teases his meat-loving Hindu neighbor and friend with a plate of meat, knowing that he cannot admit to eating meat in public.
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The Order would be better off if creator Dennis Heaton (Ghost Wars) and his co-writer Shelley Eriksen (Continuum) ditched all pretensions of seriousness and just fully committed to their silly spin on dark fantasy.
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Danny Elfman, the score's composer and now a four-time Oscar nominee, was still the leader of Oingo Boingo, a rock band with obscure pretensions that had already made the cult classic film Forbidden Zone.
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Given the choice, why in the world would you waste time on prissy pretensions like plate discipline or on-base percentage when you could instead smash the everloving shit out of every baseball you see?
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The content of a man's character bears no relation to his skill with a ball, and the sooner we come to terms with that as a society the sooner we can drop our meaningless pretensions.
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For those of my generation not fortunate enough to attend college, such tragic pretensions could seem self-indulgent, if not cowardly; they were already getting shot at slogging through rice paddies or under jungle canopies.
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The life of the innocent cannot be allowed to depend on that much luck nor the states dishonored by pretensions of infallibility in absolutely every capital case that comes before its all but overwhelmed courts.
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The film's vilification obscured how effectively its over-the-top satire ridicules the seriousness of the Disaster Movie's artistic pretensions, trafficking in the genre's clichés while it bludgeons their self-seriousness and hollows out their meanings.
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After its Chinese manufacturer pulled out of its supply deal, Jolla gave up any pretensions to ever being able to produce enough tablets to supply its crowdfunders, effectively marking the end of the company's hardware ambitions.
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But be forewarned that there's also a 71-track three-CD box that slightly overplays his blues pretensions and Nat King Cole dreams, and that this one could tempt a person to covet that consumable too.
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The creators of "Silicon Valley" love to poke fun at the pretensions of its "visionaries" and the Segways and cereal bars that mask the Industrial Age ruthlessness of tech companies in hip, progressive, candy-colored campuses.
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We have the history, the tradition, the football culture, and nothing will be able to usurp that, no matter how much money is ploughed into enterprising foreign leagues with pretensions to feasting at football's top table.
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On A-Trak's Beats 1 show "Day Off Radio," the producer and Fool's Gold label cofounder premiered MSTRKFRT's "Little Red Hen," an infectious dance hall electro-boogie without the pretensions of crowd-pleasing builds and drops.
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There was little love lost between him and Rafa Benitez when he won the cup in 2005, but Mourinho seemed to truly despise Wenger's ethical pretensions when it came to money, tactics and trusting in youth.
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Ollie and Nikolai's summer antics — particularly Ollie's efforts to romance a purple-haired college student (Isabelle McNally) — come from a comparatively conventional coming-of-age movie but mesh reasonably well with the pretensions toward Eugene O'Neill.
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While we may agree that China represents a newly emerging force in Asia (it had no previous pretensions to the East or South China Sea), I believe its aims are primarily economic and materialistic, not political.
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At many points in the novel, Kalfar sketches key moments in Czech history, and the very premise of a Czech space mission is clearly a satire on the nationalist pretensions of a small post-Communist nation.
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Between the movie's many, many murders, Aakeson and Moland subtly spoof the pretensions of manly men: how they try to intimidate each other with puffed-up posturing, and how they underestimate an unassuming, "respectable" schmo like Nils.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and communist, who saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the 20th century's greatest tragedy, now embraces the Russian Orthodox Church, especially its imperial pretensions, with widely-publicized fervor.
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She demands that the other girls bear witness to her self-mythologizing and her foul pretensions, one of which is her claim to knowledge of all things cool and American, including "Calvin Klean" clothing and White Castle.
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Here, in the midst of uncomplicated prettiness, stands the 5,500-square-foot rough-complected gray concrete cube, its presence both a rebuke to the area's bourgeois pretensions as well as a reminder of its recent totalitarian history.
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The film revolves around the debauched 70th birthday party of the gruff, hard-drinking Jake Hannaford (John Huston), a veteran director working on a project that mirrors the pretensions of the then-burgeoning, auteur-influenced New Hollywood.
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"You could call Roeg a pretentious director, but he is a gifted one, and many of his pretensions pay off in beauty, tension and a mysterious, unsettling power," Jack Kroll wrote in reviewing the movie in Newsweek.
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Mr. Ortega and Ms. Murillo should now face the fact that any realistic, sustainable solution to this crisis must contemplate the end of their pretensions to establish another dynastic dictatorship like the one that murdered my grandfather.
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But although the 1987 double-LP Sign 'O' the Times was his greatest album by acclamation, his obsessive overproduction led to musical dilution, his cinematic dreams were barely pretensions, and his sales never again approached Purple Rain levels.
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At the end of the day we might conclude that the private security detail isn't that big of a deal -- it satisfies the President-Elect's princely pretensions and gives him an excuse to keep his buddies close by.
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Even the thwarted Englishman, in his later years, acknowledged that the rightful claim to being first to the pole went to Plaisted and his snowmobiling pals, although their voyage lacked the high-minded pretensions of golden-age exploration.
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In a way, this is the ideal outcome for someone still transitioning from the self-selecting collegiate community to the open waters of general society: Pretensions and frivolous preoccupations fall to the wayside, traded in for practical routines.
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In her view, the New Left failed to grasp that its own professional-class origins, status anxieties, and cultural pretensions were the reason that it had not bridged the gap with the working class in the 1960s and 1970s.
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The twentieth century's pretensions to humanity end in mass incarceration and solitary confinement, where men are kept alive for years and subjected to procedural niceties while the state waits for the morning when it can paralyze and poison them.
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When he confronts Peter Parker toward the end of the movie and gives him the old, "We're not so different, you and I" number, neither Parker nor the movie itself has any response to Toomes' pretensions to being society's injured victim.
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The mercurial street gangs that have haunted Bogotá for a generation may not carry ideological pretensions, but they recruit from the improvised shantytowns that have sprouted up as refugees from the war-torn countryside settle along the city's ever-expanding periphery.
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It's a strange way of humanizing them, pulling away their universalist pretensions, like the pornographic satires of the French Revolution, or the inherent republicanism in the fact that sometimes the Queen of England has to use the toilet like everyone else.
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Their dedication and solidarity (as well as their reckless, good-timing approach to life, sex and art) stand in contrast to the greed and pretensions of the directors and producers, who lack vision, humanity and any sense of craft or fun.
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Thomas Adès's "The Exterminating Angel," based on the 1962 Luis Buñuel film, tells the story of a hellish soiree from which none of the partygoers can bring themselves to leave, even after food, water and pretensions to amiability have been exhausted.
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But at the Met Breuer she emerges as the liveliest artist in a movement that was often marred by intellectual and poetic pretensions, and whose abstracted themes of nature and metaphysics rarely appealed to American sensibilities, and still don't very much.
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I thought that, at least, an event that is as openly geared towards the pretensions and predilections of the idle rich would indulge in some form of pretension that could fake sophistication, setting all this goofy horse trotting to Debussy or something.
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Some academic leaders, though, quickly figured out that the only way through this was to abandon pretensions of rigor or normality, shifting their entire universities to a pass/fail option in an attempt to ease tensions and recognize the anxiety of the moment.
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While "The Most Dangerous Year" can be intensely personal — Knowlton speaks of the pain she felt watching visitors to a strawberry festival sign the petition for the anti-transgender ballot measure — it is primarily an informational documentary, not a film with artistic pretensions.
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To some extent, he follows the filmmaker in dissecting the pretensions of the aristocratic hosts and their guests: the opera singer and her conductor, the rational doctor and his delirious patient, the young couple lost in self-indulgent love, and the rest.
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In heightening jazz song to a consciously stylized popular form, in crafting edgy melodies that blossom into beautifully complex flower patterns once you've heard them a few times, Emily's D+Evolution is the rare album that realizes its ambitions and/or pretensions.
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But perhaps the most surprising turn of events was the exit-poll data: Despite the pretensions of sisterhood across racial and party lines that briefly glimmered in reaction to Trump's notorious "nasty woman" and pussy-grab quotes, that solidarity flamed out at the ballot box.
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Considering Freddie's own feelings on the move as well as much that has been said and written in the last few months, West Ham seem to be in danger of alienating many of their traditional, working-class fans with their pretensions to corporate grandeur.
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When Joffrey assumed the throne after his father King Robert's murder (or "hunting accident"), Sandor was sworn into the Kingsguard as one of Joffrey's most important protectors — even though he ostentatiously refused to ever become a "knight," hating the pretensions and hypocrisies of chivalry.
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Her screeching, off-pitch desecrations of Mozart's "Queen of the Night" aria from "The Magic Flute," the Bellini aria "Casta Diva" from "Norma" and other coloratura showpieces are accurately captured in a movie that gleefully lays waste to the pretensions of highbrow musical culture.
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But Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser: He is consumed by imagined slights to his fragile ego, hypersensitive to the pretensions of smarty-pants liberals, a man who spends many hours a day watching cable news and seething with anger.
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Not least, she's important because she bears the scars of coming through a run of place and time dominated by the pretensions to power of men, whether it was the manic Alberto Del Rio or WWE's decades-long insistence on cookie cutter Divas and women's storylines.
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Out of all the things the NFL could sell—and these are some of the most astonishing athletes in the world, playing this violent and magnetic sport better and faster than anyone has ever played it—the NFL sells the itchy baronial pretensions of its owners.
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The EU itself sometimes displays a puppyish eagerness to have its military pretensions stroked: "Please, please, don't just look at us as a big free-trade area," pleaded Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs, at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last year.
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With its stigmata and stabbing shock-cuts, "Black Swan" is "Grand Guignol with pretensions to class," and "Flesh and Bone" ups the ante with incest, self-mutilation, Russian mobsters and fancy-ass pole-dancing, reducing the ballerina to a tormented butterfly pinned by the Male Gaze.
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Despite fears that the U.S. might quit NATO — and pretensions by France and Germany that they could field a European military force to replace it — the fact is that under the Trump administration, U.S. spending on NATO has increased and European spending on NATO also has increased.
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Dazzling though Mr. Frayn's engineering is, "Noises Off" would be a mere dissertation in clever dramaturgical mechanics, were it not for the expertly drawn characters, here embodied by a first-rate cast well aware of the addictions, indulgences, pretensions and general egotism of actors (some actors!) that Mr.
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With facts that lead to no definitive legal conclusions, ordinary people are left with the impression that there is no principle in law, only politics — and that those who purport to act in the name of justice are merely politicians with impressive degrees and implausible pretensions to objectivity.
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So is a mahogany armoire that Ms. Barrie found in an antiques store on Broadway while she was on the way to buy groceries, as well as a tiger-striped bamboo rocker and a lamp with Tiffany pretensions that were both bought at a junk shop in Milwaukee.
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At the same time, they poke fun at art world pretensions by leveraging abstraction and a fine art context to lure the (frequently unsuspecting, I'd suspect) viewer into marveling at a conduit for waste for an hour as he or she grasps at metaphysical or art historical interpretation.
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And in German society, for all its pretensions to gender equality, a woman is expected to be the primary caregiver, while it is less acceptable for a man to tell his superiors that he has to go home earlier to get the kids' supper or put them to bed.
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On Sunday, April 28500, when most Western and Eastern Christians were celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a Messiah whose kingdom is not of this world, a slim majority of Turks resurrected the pretensions to one-man rule and regional hegemony of the neo-Ottoman Turkish President, Recep Tayip Erdoğan.
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But they were building a life on a fragile foundation, and in September 2011, whatever pretensions of security they had were shattered when ICE raided a field in Mariposa County where Audemio was working, sweeping him up along with several others and deporting him across the California border the same day.
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As much comic energy as Stewart ever expended in eviscerating politicians of the right, which was mother's milk to his audience he had more than enough left over to rain satirical fire down on what he perceived as the indiscretions and pretensions of the media, mostly of the TV variety.
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Much like some eccentric primatologist who lives amongst mountain gorillas for months on end, a part of us wants to cultivate their acceptance so that we may see through their eyes, gradually follow their lead in shedding our own civilised pretensions and, eventually, learn to imitate their wild and exhilarating ways.
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This bar is a comfortable place with foodie pretensions, and in Kate Benson's savory, skewering comedy "[Porto]," it's where the brainy, funny, lonely heroine goes for a little company — once she's talked herself, surely not for the first time, into believing that it's O.K. for a woman to get a drink by herself.
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He challenged his readers and audiences to burst bubbles of conventional wisdom on almost every issue imaginable, from the rightful place of women to the pretensions of empires, from the glory of war to the treatment of animals, from homosexuality to children's rights, from religious doctrine to the treatment of the poor.
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First, Ryan makes a mockery of his pretensions to fiscal responsibility with a tax-cut bill that would make the deficit soar, and then, citing the skyrocketing deficit he would create with the tax cuts, he prepares to attack some of the worthiest, most popular programs that Democrats have given the nation.
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"Among the voting members today, we have seven doctors of economics who basically have been taught the same things, who think in the same format, and I think that we are the prisoners of a very dubious set of pseudo-scientific pretensions on the part of the people who manage our monetary affairs," he said.
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His pictures were inspired by the turn-of-the-century German Jugendstil ("youth style," or Art Nouveau), graphic artist provocateurs who regularly outraged both bourgeois and aristocratic Junker classes by poking holes in their masks and debunking their pretensions in the notorious weekly satirical journal Simplicissimus (also known as Der Simpl in the 1940s).
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Whatever the mythopoeic pretensions of the attackers, the target is almost always ordinary, everyday life: People are killed on their way to work, bored and restless and hovering over their small worries, or while enduring the administered interminability of air travel, or buying food and necessities, or on another vaguely satisfying night out with friends.
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"Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age: the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known," Richard Kluger wrote in "The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune" (287).
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Her family's pretensions to gentility, exposed at a nightmare dinner party held to impress her beau, lead to disaster, and, at the end of the novel, Alice, facing reality, is seen mounting the steps to a dreaded secretarial school—a very different kind of heroine from the generally insipid or idealized Tarkington leading lady.
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Second, and closely related, any criticism of the man just gives him more attention: iIf it weren't for all the outrage, he'd still be just another sad dweeb reviewing pencils for the Telegraph, and every time you make fun of his flimsy pretensions, you're just helping him get more famous and feeding the vast churning mill of his ego.
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But the musician, who now divides her time between London and Los Angeles, has no pretensions about starting a new career late in life and credits much of the success of the installation to MASS MoCA's director, Joseph Thompson, who took her proposal for the mound seriously, and the curatorial and technical staff who made it a reality.
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"I will fight against rationality and any pretensions to it," proclaims the opening paragraph of a 15-page "press release" written by curator and Kavita B. Schmid co-founder Eric Schmid, furnished as an accompaniment to Eric Schmid is an Idiot — a group show organized by Kavita B Schmid (of Chicago) and What Pipeline (of Detroit), and hosted at Cave (in Detroit).
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"What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast without our pretensions to singular national virtue," Hofstadter wrote in the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, the 1972 collection he co-edited with Michael Wallace.
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We shall see how working-class voters in key electoral vote states react to the president-elect nominating as secretary of Labor a fast-food executive who is hostile to the interests of workers Trump pretended to champion during the campaign, and how they react as they learn that Trump's pretensions of populism during the campaign were, in fact, a fraud. Sen.
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Like this movie, Flynn's books fall into a category you might call anti-middlebrow: packaged as thrillers, written in the knowing pop-cultural cadence of mid-2000s blogs and comprising a disorienting blend of genre influences, they avoid the striving pretensions of bad literary fiction, despite also being fairly dense and containing, sneakily, many of the pleasures of a digressive social novel.
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The 1873 financial crisis and resulting depression, for example, shifted politics across Europe and North America: In Vienna, as the Princeton scholar Carl Schorske has written, nationalists with "aristocratic pretensions" seized political control, and intellectuals enthused over the medieval romanticism of Richard Wagner's operas; in the United States, 1890s populists attacked the banking industry, globalism, and immigrants—and glorified yeoman farmers, pioneers, and the American Revolution.
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While one might fairly counter that professional football, unlike a federal Europe, has never had any pretensions to being a democracy, it's perhaps understandable that fans have become frustrated with a situation where – just as Vote Leave suggested was the case with the EU – Wenger is given a considerable sum of money each week by people he is not directly answerable to, many of whom are unhappy with the results.
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Several years ago when this week began, after the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville but before the President of the United States finally gave up his pretensions of decency and publicly aligned his vision with their own, some people attempted to market a game and others attempted to write about it in the massive, ongoing LARP of normality in which so many of us take part every day.
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President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE struck that balance masterfully during his meeting with Queen Elizabeth on his state visit to the United Kingdom, displaying his sincere respect for the royal family without kowtowing to any of the regal pretensions.
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"Oh Bejeweled Realm" satirizes the pretensions of both Iran's Westernizing regime and its middle-class intellectuals: Tomorrow I can, In the backroom of Khachick's shop, Snort a few grams of some of the purest stuff, Swill a few glasses of mixed-up Pepsi-Cola, Give out a few oh Gods, and Hallelujahs, haw-haws, aha-aha-aha, And formally join the ranks of high-minded thinkers and an asinine Enlightenment.
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And while I am less sympathetic than Moskowitz to campus deplatforming at elite universities and liberal arts institutions, because—as a product of one myself—I cannot help but find the pretensions of student activists in these privileged enclaves to a shared subaltern status with America's poor and oppressed to be weirdly self-congratulatory, I am also increasingly convinced that both student activists and the newspaper columnists who despise them are right to identify campuses as vanguards of contested space, precisely because they function, in Moskowitz's formulation, as microcosms of the broader society and testing grounds for social change.
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In the case of the USSR, the main structural contradictions were as follows: the working class was increasingly repressed and unable to self-organise through trade unions (ironic given the country's Communist pretensions); the wealthier 'bourgeoisie' or elite had money to spend, but nothing to buy from domestic production, leading to economic stagnation; Russian intellectuals wanted more freedom of expression; minorities wanted more autonomy; and peasants wanted more freedom of movement The model works like this: the more those contradictions deepen, the greater the likelihood they will result in a social crisis that could upend the existing order.
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