Word: benign
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...assume that Case, Levin, Ted Turner and Bob Pittman are the benign presences they appear to be. The problem has to do with putting the structure in place now for what will certainly happen later. It has to do with what media critic Ben Bagdikian prophesied more than a decade ago: that fewer and fewer corporations would come to dominate the media environment, resulting in the free-enterprise equivalent of a Ministry of Culture. It has to do with mega-communications conglomerates that are already bigger than the economies of countries whose monopolistic information policies we condemn as a violation...
...saying we should be paying $30,000 a year so we can regress back to the third grade. Still, there might be some room in our incredibly regimented lives for some unstructured pursuits. At MIT, for example, students regularly apply their engineering savvy toward benign, anonymous pranks. Recognizing these "hacks" as a valuable creative outlet, the administration often looks the other way, tacitly encouraging the practice. At Princeton and Cornell, it is common for students to flood en masse into the streets on weekends, simply to congregate and engage in spontaneous activity. In contrast, a professor who lives on Harvard...