Word: alarmism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Asked what he thought he should be paid, Einstein, a financial innocent, suggested $3,000 a year. The hardheaded Elsa got that upped to $16,000.) Though occupied with his lonely struggle to unify gravity and electromagnetism in a single mathematical framework, he watched Germany's saber rattling with alarm. Despite his earlier pacifism, he spoke in favor of military action against Hitler. Without fanfare, he helped scores of Jewish refugees get into an unwelcoming U.S., including a young photographer named Philippe Halsman, who would take the most famous picture of him (reproduced on the cover of this issue...
...nubs and endlessly tinkered with stuff. When he was six, his sister Christina was born; a year later, his brother Mark arrived. When the siblings were old enough to get into Jeff's bedroom, he rigged a buzzer to his door that would go off like a burglar alarm. Later, in what his family has come to think of as the "solar-cooker era"--named after a solar microwave he concocted out of an umbrella and aluminum foil--the garage became his laboratory...
Factories, meanwhile, required workers to begin their days together: it's no coincidence that inexpensive alarm clocks and wristwatches began appearing at the end of the 1800s. "In the 19th century," says historian Michael O'Malley, author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, "we were urged to merge our sense of time with mechanical devices. It allowed for new forms of social organization...
...sure mark of a good piece of art is that it tempts the viewer to touch it. Unfortunately, we usually only encounter art in museums and galleries, where the alarm goes off if you get too near (once, at an exhibition of Jacques Lipchitz sculptures, the frustration of this got the better of me and I had to plead for mercy with the guards.) Some art awakens entirely different desires, compelling the viewer instead to talk about it, to stare at it, to look away from it, to imitate it or to think about it. The work by Museum School...
...senior officials went out of their way to warn the media not to treat this as a case of crying wolf. "This sounds to me larger than many of the ones we've put out," an official told the Los Angeles Times. "You don't want to over-alarm them, but if we have this information, there's an obligation to tell them." Some specifics would be nice...