Such characteristics may strike some as faults - and indeed many critics have taken that view - but they give to Narayan's stories a delightful, organic feel.
Critics took offense that the General Assembly president, Vuk Jeremic, whose antipathy toward the Yugoslavia tribunal is well known, had invited as keynote speaker the like-minded president of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolic, but not the victims of Balkans atrocities who have found some measure of redress from the tribunal's prosecutions.
Dr. Mann was named in 377 of the e-mail messages, including several that critics took to suggest that he had manipulated or destroyed data to strengthen his case that human activity was changing the global climate.
Mr. Beckstrom said some critics abroad might take that to mean Internet governance still is not truly global.
But rape is controversial there too: in an argument about abortions for rape victims, Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican, spoke of "legitimate" rape (which critics took to mean that he thought some rapes were bogus).
In his Osservatore Romano article, Vallini reviews a new book by an Italian music critic who has taken that sport to the extreme.
The event was such a resounding success that several critics took it as a sign that Moscow is now, finally, regaining its place on the world theater circuit.
Mr. Perrault's striking plan for the Mariinsky capped the building with a black marble dome covered in gold-hued glass, a feature that critics took to calling a "golden potato".
Coming of age during and after the progressive era, when intellectual argument and political activism promised to reshape America's future, these critics took it for granted that literature was among the main signs of the times, and subject to the inquiring gaze of history and politics.
