Word: babel
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...because his loyalties, his principles, are so hard to determine. He was a Jew who prospered during the anti-Semitic Stalin years, while other notable Jewish writers were judicially murdered; he was a poet and novelist who won the Stalin Prize while his personal friends Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were sent to the gulag. Clearly, Ehrenburg was no beacon of conscience...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
Film may be the universal language, but business can be Babel. When the Koreans, through an interpreter, explained their goals, Spielberg got a twinge in his belly--and it wasn't the bass. "The word semiconductor must have been used about 20 times during that 2-1/2-hr. encounter," Spielberg recalls. "I thought to myself, 'How are they going to know anything about the film business when they're so obsessed with semiconductors?' It was another one of those evenings that turned out to be a complete waste of time...
...Caplan Edmonton, Canada Hyperdemocracy was an excellent article about an important issue of our time. Congress is becoming a poll-watching, poll-taking Babel, far from the independent deliberative body envisioned by the Founders. We are witnessing the decline of representative democracy to a level not unlike that of rabble- led assemblies in Revolutionary France...
Lacey Rayner, age 15 Modesto, California Hyperdemocracy was an excellent article about an important issue of our time. Congress is becoming a poll-watching, poll-taking Babel, far from the independent deliberative body envisioned by the Founders. We are witnessing the decline of representative democracy to a level not unlike that of rabble-led assemblies in Revolutionary France...