Word: ascent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Communications breakthroughs increased the impression that Everest was accessible to nearly anyone. Climbers call home from the summit using satellite phones. They send E-mail. Over the past two months, socialite-alpinist Sandy Hill Pittman has been describing her ascent with Fischer's group on the Internet and throwing in remarks about books and recipes. One of her cyber correspondents inquired as to whether there were "any permanent markers at the summit. Flags, or plaques, or anything like that? A gift shop, perhaps?" Pittman didn't tell her new friend that the most enduring mementos on Everest's higher reaches...
...like to think that we are the residing beneficiaries of humankind's slow, lurching ascent from the fens of superstition toward the cool empyrean of reason. Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, the thinkers who preceded him, and we stand on Newton's, plus his successors'. Because of them, we can map the human genome system and fling spacecraft past Jupiter. We are much too busy and progressive, thank you, for the magic charms and potions and amulets that so bedazzled our dim ancestors. We clasp at this faith and manage to hold on in spite...
...generations of stock-market traders have rephrased the proverb, What goes up must come down. But that ancient bit of sententiousness is out of favor on Wall Street today. To be sure, no one quite dares to predict that after more than eight years of almost vertical ascent since the Crash of '87, share prices can keep going up forever. There are some signs of nervousness that one of these days a financial version of the law of gravity will reassert itself, as evidenced by last week's 94-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average...
...course, not every American is self-defined according to the particular form ambition takes. But most of us are, including many people a sociologist would define as working class or poor. It's hard to find a person who has never harbored some dream of socioeconomic ascent...
...does he reach such a conclusion? Director Martin Scorsese does not attempt to explain, but chooses to chronicle, sometimes sympathetically, Travis's descent into violence (or, in his mind, his ascent towards justice). Whatever deeper psychological history lies in Travis's past, we never find out: as the movie's focus brings us closer and closer into his own world, we observe firsthand the wanderings of this tortured soul...