Word: cauldron
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...BOILING CAULDRON of tortured artists. Franz Kafka must surely hold a place of honor. Born at a bad time, in a worse place, and raised by a middle-class family that had little use for writers. Kafka spent his life floundering in a morass of guilt and self-hatred. Never quite convinced of his right to exist, he wore himself down with ceaseless self-dissection, suffocated in an office job the talent he knew he had, and often tried to sabotage his most precious relationships. Although he never formally committed suicide-a failure he gloated over with particular relish...
...gaseous). Willan also serves up historical tidbits. For example: Proust's madeleines came from Commercy in Lorraine; the word restaurant originated in Paris more than 200 years ago, when an innkeeper started offering bowls of bouillon known as restauratifs, and chowder is derived from chaudière, a cauldron in which fishermen pooled their catch...
...naked eye, inanimate objects like a block of stone or a piece of metal appear totally lifeless. But scientists see a veritable cauldron of activity in the most passive-looking object. Its atoms and molecules are in constant motion, vibrating furiously, bumping into neighbors, reeling in every direction. Though imperceptible to human senses, this chaotic ballet is critically important. Not only does it determine the very nature of observed matter (what makes a stone a stone, for example), it controls what will happen when one substance is brought together with another...
...admixture of wealth, rivalry and instability has made the Middle East a brimming cauldron of the trade, accounting for a third of the world's arms deals. From 1973 to 1980, Middle East and South Asian countries received from the major exporters 4,050 combat planes; 25,250 tanks, self-propelled guns and artillery; 21,680 armored personnel carriers; 26,020 surface-to-air missiles, and countless rifles and machine guns...
...investigation of the state bureaucracy began. Following these moves, Sadat declared in a tough speech that "lack of discipline in any way or form" had ended in his country. This time, however, the visionary statesman and consummate strategist had fatally misjudged the situation: his killers emerged from a cauldron of seething unrest and fanaticism...