Word: 20th
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...first half of the 20th century, both Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Soviets used forced labor to build up their infrastructure. From 1918 to 1956, between 15 million and 30 million people are estimated to have died from exhaustion, illness and malnutrition after toiling in the notorious Soviet gulag in 14-hour days felling trees, digging in the frigid Siberian tundra or mining coal. Often the labor was as fruitless as the punishments devised by the British. In the early 1930s, more than 100,000 prisoners toiled to construct a canal between the White and Baltic seas - which turned...
Prisons are violent places by nature. America's first recorded prison riot took place even before the Declaration of Independence, in Connecticut's Newgate prison in 1774, and uprisings continue to this day. One report estimates that U.S. correctional institutions saw more than 1,300 riots in the 20th century. Prison insurgencies can be tied to a wide range of causes, including racial tension, gang rivalries, individual feuds and general grievances against guards and prison administrators. (See pictures of Gitmo detainees' portraits...
...opportunity to reinject space exploration into the national consciousness. So I was disappointed that you ran a human-interest piece. The astronauts' post-NASA lives are not the primary story. The Apollo program represents more than a technological feat. The audacity to go to the moon was perhaps the 20th century's greatest illustration of America's optimism. Present generations of Americans need to recapture some of that audacity. Vincent Augelli, SAN DIEGO...
...absolutely certain how to proceed is liberating, and crucial. I like paradoxes, which is why, even though I'm not particularly religious, Zen Buddhism has always appealed to me. Take the paradoxical state that Buddhists seek to achieve, what they call sho-shin, or "beginner's mind." The 20th century Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who spent the last dozen years of his life in America, famously wrote that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." Which sounds to me very much like the core of Boorstin's amateur...
...hypocrisy staring everyone in the face. Tackling government corruption and greed in a developing context is admittedly a challenging task, but that is perhaps not even the real issue. Obiang could easily invest in bringing Malabo and the rest of the country’s infrastructure into the 21st (20th?) century and still have plenty of money left over to squander...