Word: amidst
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...also innovative, reaches its apex. Here, Thiong’o presents Kamiti, a sensitive and perceptive young man, who tries several times to escape from the corrupt society that surrounds him to keep himself spiritually pure. He encounters Nyawira, a young woman who actively fights for social change amidst the corrupted society, as they flee from the police. Although at first they are wary of one another, they end up cooperating to scare off the policeman who follows them by posturing as the Wizard of the Crow. From this original collaboration, a whole mythos is created. The officer later comes...
When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe...
...sometimes-hostile territory ("Bullets shattered the rear screen," of his car, he writes). Ark leads had guided him to Egypt, Ethiopia and even New Guinea, until one day last fall his clues led him to a storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver...
...maintain its unique status in Cuban society. The regime has always appreciated the Vatican's denunciations of the American blockade as a human rights violation. There is also fundamental agreement in both Cuban and Catholic doctrine about caring for the weak and underprivileged. Still, the relationship has its limits amidst the government control of information and silencing of opposition movements, which have often included Catholic intellectuals and clergy. The island's leading dissident, Oswaldo Paya, is a devout Catholic and is often referred to as the Lech Walesa of Cuba. In December, Cuban security agents stormed a church in Santiago...
...marked by lyceums and FDR’s “fireside chats,” into a culture of passivity empowered by infotainment and a bottom-line corporate mentality. In this new culture, Jacoby says, scope is sacrificed for sales and science is increasingly drowned amidst the white noise of politicized junk-thought. Even the habit of reading appears increasingly obsolete. The strictly secular, intellectual merit of Jefferson, Paine, and Emerson that founded the country has given way to the lionization of celebrities and the perpetuation of anti-intellectual ideals (namely creationism and gender stereotyping) that most other modernized...