Sentences with word «portentous»

In a portentous interview on the Freakonomics podcast — conducted last summer but airing on Monday — host Stephen Dubner touched on a question that would come to dominate Zuckerberg's life just a few months later.

And, perhaps, to show us again, if we'd forgotten, that almost any patch of uttered prose can seem portentous when standing alone and set off by quotation marks.

I was young then and living in the States; these were portentous times for that country, and the events made a very great impression on me;... [more]

The court also, in a portentous footnote, rejected the notion that the subrogation clause in the insurance contract should be the basis for relief.

The latest to succumb was the British newspaper The Independent, which screamed on its front page: «This is global warming», above an alarmingly portentous graphic of Hurricane Rita's projected path.

There are many portentous statements in the comments on this topic but recent polls suggest that the 97 % consensus of climate scientists is not yet generally shared.

The newspaper has led the charge in fomenting worry over the gas emissions, with portentous, and remarkably similar, stories in 2008 and this week.

Despite portentous headlines — including one on the news release from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, saying «Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing...» — there is no evidence (yet) that what is happening is fundamentally new or destabilizing, at least according to some of the scientists most closely tracking levels and sources of this gas from the poles to the tropics.

Gates nicely summarizes the book's analysis of the famous wager over the limits of natural resources between the ecologist Ehrlich, author of the portentous bestseller «The Population Bomb,» and Simon, a champion of free markets and human ingenuity (called the «Doomslayer» by Wired).

I'll focus on chemicals and health here, exploring some of the rather portentous coverage of a new study of chemicals detected in pregnant women.

While this untitled work's format and amorphous black figures call to mind Pablo Picasso's studies for Guernica (1937), its blacked - out background, establishing a portentous mood, is uniquely Pollock's own.

The result is an aura of portentous theatricality, a compelling miasma that directly invites viewer interaction while simultaneously warning against it.

Note for example how different the laundry room is from Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea, of 1951, the midcentury benchmark for the portentous depiction of empty rooms.

The seas are menacing, reflecting, as his granddaughter Nora Hoppe says, his portentous view of the world.

Cat, London, Marlborough Fine Art (and travelling), Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1959 - 1971, 1971, p. 8) While adhering to the classic dyadic, controlled structure of Gottlieb's Bursts, the surface of the present work nevertheless maintains a portentous volatility.

Despite zombie film stars and a portentous coffin, Adrian Searle finds Europe's largest art fair alive and thriving

Large - scale landscapes, with portentous crimson skies and the signature blackened bleed of paint, communicate Hambling's heartfelt cry about global warming, she elucidates «great paintings like those of Rothko feel as if the painting is happening right in front of you, the ice caps melting in front of your eyes...»

In this, he resembles his more representational American contemporary, Edward Hopper: their pictures» low sunlight, their deep and often irrational shadows, their empty walkways and portentous silences creating an enigmatic visual poetry.

In «Early Retirement», his recent exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, Procession 1 (2017) shows a sombre protest flanked by Death - like, helmeted police, while Library 1 (2017) pictures an enigmatic trove consisting of, among other things, a spear, a sword, a raven and what may be Gibson's own influences: volumes by Dante Alighieri, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Toni Morrison and others fill the room as a portentous wind blows through the fireplace.

In a 2010 New Criterion essay titled «My Jerry Saltz Problem,» James Panero wrote, «On Facebook and now elsewhere online, Saltz regularly mixes portentous metaphysical questions with internet messianism, unctuous flattery of his followers, treacly self - doubt, and gaseous emissions of political cant.

With the dazzlingly cataclysmic sunsets and portentous musical soundtrack nearby bleeding into her performance, this improbable political commentator takes on a phantasmagoric presence: a talking head belonging to a world on a knife edge between utopia and dystopia.

Miroslaw Balka: «The Order of Things» (closes on Saturday) The single rousingly portentous sculpture here involves black liquid continually gushing from suspended, industrial - size hoses into a pair of giant bins made of rusty steel plate.

Or is he the last word in portentous overkill?

The mood of Harrison's paintings is sometimes portentous: blood - red suns, human ignorance and copulating corpses all feature, the latter in a mini-series titled Love Means Never Having to Say You're Ugly.

I learned about strength and defiance from Matta - Clark's cutting gesture against the portentous physicality of architecture.

Trecartin was one of the first artists to understand the Internet as portentous, but entertainingly so.

The portentous titles, the theatrical installations and the flashy gold costume would be O.K. if they were offered in a more humorous mood.

Both the beauty and horror of German life are combined in a dreamy night scene of rich, yet portentous blackness.

Eschewing the taut focus he used to seemingly resuscitate waxworks in his series of uncanny historical portraits, Hiroshi Sugimoto trained a loosened lens on familiar architectural landmarks, from Le Corbusier's Notre - Dame at Ronchamps to the MCA building itself, to offer a portentous glimpse of our surroundings, as the artist puts it, «after the end of the world.»

I laughed out loud at the portentous row of leather - bound volumes high up on the wall, purporting to contain his collected writings.

But artists are sometimes their own worst advocates, and Rothko's remarks seem to have become more portentous and bellicose as other artists overtook the first alumni of the New York school, the so - called abstract expressionists.

In his ambitious canvases, long considered a hallmark of contemporary figurative painting, he creates a tense world of both comfort and portentous ambiguity.

If Not Apollo, the Breeze takes the ancient literary history of the oracle at Delphi as its starting point to explore the irrational, ambiguous, infallible, portentous, performative, hallucinatory, and predictive.

Walking through the mind - maze of this year's exhibition of four shortlisted artists, particularly the work of Dublin - born Duncan Campbell, one feels at the mercy of a lot of portentous theorising.

Even The Village Voice raged that the art was angry, portentous, condescending, groaningly didactic, hateful.

His vertical line, full of portent (but not «portentous», as sceptics might claim) speaks of creation, God — and the human urge to draw a line.

Very witty as well, and not nearly as portentous as his better - remembered rival Clement Greenberg.

(In this regard, he is closer in spirit to an experimental, non-narrative poet than a conventional, narrative one)... Whereas de Kooning famously equated oil paint and flesh, Thiebaud seems to equate oil paint with nature — from impassive stone to ephemeral cloud, and from warm glowing light to portentous back lighting.

Interactive Entertainment announced today that «Dying Light», a new first - person, action survival horror video game with a portentous day - night cycle set in a vast open world overrun...

A portentous affair, it's inspired by the classical school of music to support the setting of upper - class nitwits having a get together, talking about how good the wine is.

The word is especially portentous in light of a note that came with at least one of the packages: «The giant gateway calls out to me, filling my mind with whispered secrets of a far - flung world.»

Most of all I hope the game is as fun as cartoon - styled, open world pirate simulator should be, rather than a portentous dirge fest like Assassins Creed.

We're not convinced the UX is actually a thinly - veiled look at a new Lexus model, but it does seem likely it's a portentous concept heralding a further tilt in to SUVs from Lexus.

The sedan's launch comes at a portentous moment for Hyundai Motor, which has faced engine - related recall problems in the U.S. and supply chain problems in China, and for South Korea, Land of the Morning Calm, where anxiety is building about the PyeongChang Olympics in February.

The biography of teacher evaluation's time in federal policy might be titled Portentous, Polarizing, and Passing.

I just wish that Twohy had either done more with the epic story of a death - loving race sowing destruction on planet after planet and the possibility that RIddick's role in stopping the destruction had long been foretold, or that he had abandoned the portentous and pretentious storyline altogether and just stuck to monsters.

His precision and control over tone, pitch and mood — much of which is gripping and portentous — is immaculate.

There are no special features, just a trailer that makes the movie sounds worse than it is (it has one of those portentous voice - overs peculiar to bad action movies made in the 1980s).

In honor of the title we'll break this part of the sentence with a colon, and then use a portentous dash:

It occupies the most portentous, creaky manor imaginable.