Pavel
What means:Just about everyone who appears in "Winners Take All" comes out looking the worse for it.
Nov 9, 2018 8:51 AM
Answers · 2
It is helpful to give the source of a quotation. I had to look this one up. You are referring to a book review in "The New Yorker." The book is "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World," by reporter Anand Giridharadas. The book is about super-rich corporate titans who engage in philanthropic projects in hope of "changing the world" for the better. The review is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/gospels-of-giving-for-the-new-gilded-age "Look" has an abstract sense here, the same as "seem." "Looking worse" doesn't mean physically ugly. It means that our opinions of them are worse than before. Before reading the book, we think of these people as good people. They seem like they are making the world better. They "look like" they are making the world better. Your source says "Just about everyone who appears in 'Winners Take All' comes out looking the worse for it." That means that after reading the book, these people and their projects no longer look as good as they did. Their projects no longer seem effective. After we read the book, we do not admire them as much as we did before. The reviewer is telling us that Giridharadas does not present anybody in the book in a positive way. There are no true heroes in the book. The subtitle of the book is "the elite charade of changing the world." The "elite" are the aristocracy, the people on top of the social pyramid, the super-rich. "Charades" is literally a party game of pretense and acting. "A charade" is a false pretense. You give the appearance of doing something, but it is just appearance.
November 9, 2018
'almost everyone who takes part in it looks like it was bad for them in the end' :)
November 9, 2018
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