Word: argument
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...need not choose between these visions. Both are true. Both are untrue. What we need to do is wonder at how firmly this brief, incredibly fecund period set the terms of the cultural argument that would preoccupy the rest of the century. The shock of the new drew much of its reshaping, revolutionary force from frustration with outworn artistic conventions and had been gathering strength and energy out of repression and dismissal for at least 50 years...
...impact were measured only in number of lives lost, one argument goes, Hitler would fall behind his fellow despots, Stalin and Mao. There are those who insist that Hitler is not the century's dominant figure because he was simply the latest in a long line of murderous figures, stretching back to before Genghis Khan. The only difference was technology: Hitler went about his cynical carnage with all the efficiency that modern industry had perfected...
There is a more nuanced, even insidious, argument for Hitler's pre-eminence: that good and evil are dependent on one another. It is a fundamental tenet to many religions that evil, while mysterious, may clear the way for good, that the soul is perfected only in battle, that pain and ecstasy are somehow twins, that only a soul--or a century--that has truly suffered can truly realize joy. Again we sense this instinctively--the pleasure we feel when a tooth stops hurting reminds us that we live our life in contexts and contrasts, and so perhaps...
Safranek says this argument ignores school rules, which allow enrolled students never to set foot on campus. (They can take classes at community colleges if they wish.) He suspects the rules are really motivated by bias against home schooling, and he takes offense at the notion that his clients would lie to make their kids eligible...
...theology of painting" is how one of Diego de Velazquez's 17th century admirers described his work. What did he mean? That the work was true; that it represented a truth about nature, as theology did about God; that this truth was conclusive, beyond further argument. In a culture ruled by King and church, where the arts were easily accused of frivolity and sensuality, this was a colossal claim. Very rarely, an artist gets to transform the conditions of his culture--not just add to them or jog their evolution, but alter them decisively. This is what Picasso...