Word: barrens
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Baker and a companion are turkey hunting on 1,366 acres of Texas scrubland about 50 miles south of San Antonio, a wild, almost barren part of the U.S. where it is easy to believe that due process is still a bullet. "I call it the Rock Pile Ranch," says Baker, "and that's about all that's on it. Nothing else but some water wells and turkey feeders. Coming here is the closest I get to therapy. I'm not really into material things, but land, well, they're not making any more...
...life that won't be dismissed by politicians as too liberal. There must be a method for treating violent criminals toughly, even harshly, that won't simply be tossed off as too conservative. There can be no forgiveness, no compassion for the criminal who kills. He should face a barren and hopeless life of incarceration. Perhaps the 50 states should, together, build a giant maximum- security prison in the desert. Reinvent Dante's Inferno. Let its inhabitants languish and be forgotten by all Americans. Just don't kill them for me. I don't want to be a murderer...
Perhaps no one is better prepared for hot, dry summers than Israel's farmers. The Israelis, using drip irrigation and other techniques, have made plants bloom on land that has been barren for millenniums. Portions of the arid Negev, an area once written off as largely uncultivable, today grow fruit, flowers and winter vegetables eagerly sought by European markets. Through a process known as "fertigation" -- dripping precise quantities of water and nutrients at the base of individual plants -- crops can be grown in almost any soil, even with brackish water...
Juba is a city of wanderers roaming hopelessly through muddy streets in a desperate search for food. Silent women with empty plastic buckets throng the 2-acre Konyo-Konyo Market, scavenging through its hundreds of barren wooden stalls. Only weeds, leaves and lily pods are for sale, at 50 cents a miserable bunch. Even the richest cannot find food here. A civil servant like Michael Apollo eats only one bowl of boiled weeds a day and sends his family to beg at emergency feeding centers. Everywhere people thrust themselves forward, baring their bony chests and screaming, "Look how hungry...
Beckett sees human existence as haplessly ephemeral -- eroded away, the very moment it is lived, by aging and pain and forgetfulness and death. "They give birth astride of a grave," one of the characters cries out in the play's most memorable line. The barren landscape of Godot is not recognizably our world. The fetid tramps sleep in ditches and are beaten by nameless others in the night. But their frustrated yearning to be recognized and their sense of life as perpetual diminishment should seem universal. Instead, the supreme existentialist tragedy of the 20th century has been reduced...