Word: comforting
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What to do when you graduate into a world that seems completely different from the one you prepared for? It was good to have a few members of the Adams family near by; at least Henry could offer comfort. The Harvard historian’s generation slouched into the twentieth century with the same bewilderment with which we face ours, also feeling trained for an era that looked nothing like...
...Hebrew god is sometimes called “Elohim,” a term ending with a plural marker. He told me to shut up, because he had been studying the topic for over a dozen years. That this fellow scholar did not receive tenure is a comfort to me. However, I cannot but recognize the ethos of which he is an unsophisticated manifestation. The cult of expertise—and the pride of being named the “top” expert, by virtue of being the expert at Harvard—sometimes makes us fear to question...
...gaudy houses that stud the outskirts of every Chinese city, China stands to gain more than it loses through its building campaign. The scale of its needs remains immense: the country's leaders are, after all, attempting to move more people out of dire poverty and into something like comfort in a shorter time than has ever been seen before in human history...
...tell ourselves: that changing times make us changed people, even as we revert to age-old patterns. (This season on 24, Jack Bauer sounded ambivalent about torture but roughed up people anyway.) The zeitgeist makes convenient wrapping to repackage the same sitcoms, hospital dramas and game shows: what was "comfort food" after 9/11, "optimism" in boom times and "inspiration" after Hurricane Katrina is "escapism" today...
...Lafave's pregnant sister, for example, had been killed by a drunk driver before Lafave began hitting on a student; Hernandez is estranged from her husband. Such problems certainly aren't excuses for pedophilia, but they can compel women like Lafave to seek out emotional comfort - or a feeling of control that they might not experience in relationships with adult men. (Read about the notorious Mary K. Letourneau teacher-student affair...