Word: almost
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What are we to make of all this in practical terms, philosophical terms, even spiritual terms? How to comprehend an age in which, suddenly, we find ourselves enmeshed in a huge information-processing system, one that seems almost to have a life of its own and to be leading us headlong into a future that we can't clearly see yet can't really avoid...
...early 19th century, the coming of the railroad train further sped things up. Paired with increasingly smooth local postal service, the train meant that people thousands of miles apart were separated by only days. With chains of inspiration sprouting wildly, the multinational technical community became an almost unified consciousness. Increasingly, good ideas were...
...almost as if the producers of popular culture sensed, and tried instinctively to compensate for, this defect. For the content of movies, popular music, latterly television, has remained stubbornly locked to the 19th century traditions of melodrama and romance. We may admire the multiple narrators of Citizen Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass...
...shadows, however, Temujin would create a nation and the most disciplined fighting force on the planet. First, he escaped the wild by making a good marriage. That alliance would lead to more critical alliances as Temujin learned to ply diplomacy and a ruthless militancy. Soon, his almost supernatural generalship would win him fiercely loyal followers, enough to offset a multiplicity of traitors and false friends. He vanquished the fractious tribalism of the Mongols by dispersing clansmen among regiments in an army that used death as discipline and looting as reward. Conquered peoples were divided among the armies, swelling the ranks...
...Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson has fared the worst at the hands of revisionists. If he has managed to keep his place on Mount Rushmore, he has been vilified almost everywhere else in recent years as a slave-owning hypocrite and racist; a political extremist; an apologist for the vicious, botched French Revolution; and in general, somewhat less the genius remembered in our folklore than a provincial intellectual and tinkerer...