Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Purdy has gained national media attention since his book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, was released earlier this year. And now, despite his unassuming manner, the 24-year-old Yale Law student has emerged as a role model for many...
Purdy, home-schooled by his counterculture parents in West Virginia, said he was spurred to write For Common Things by "a keen sense of ambivalence...between the obligation to do public work and the suspicion that that work is futile and self-indulgent...
...indifference--which is solely a pretense--pacifies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students into a mannerly silence. The closeted convince themselves that being out is not a necessity or a vital political act and that overt homosexuality, like homophobia, is simply a failure of good breeding. If it is common courtesy that keeps students from homophobic violence, it is also what keeps them from queer expression. To be openly queer, and thus offensively queer, is to call into question the heterosexual noblesse oblige of which Harvard is so bafflingly proud...
SNOOZE ALARM Talk about a drunken stupor. Doctors say not getting enough sleep may dull your senses as much as drinking does. Folks with sleep apnea--a common disorder in which sufferers momentarily awaken throughout the night because breathing stops--did worse on 3 out of 7 tests of reaction time than those whose blood-alcohol level would make them too drunk to drive in 15 states. Could ordinary insomniacs run into the same problems? Probably, doctors...
...material for whatever gene the patient lacks. In Jesse's study, all 18 participants had the same disease: ornithine transcarbamoylase (OTC) deficiency, which slows the liver's ability to metabolize nitrogen and releases deadly ammonia into the bloodstream. So Wilson's team harnessed the adenovirus (a cause of the common cold), neutralized harmful elements and used the virus to send in normal copies of the gene that was defective in Jesse...