Word: direction
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Though his protectors, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, still refuse to hand him over, he is constrained not to tick them off. The U.S. warned the Taliban again last week to expect harsh reprisals if bin Laden acts. They responded that he cannot even use fax or phone to direct his enterprises, but U.S. officials don't believe...
...information, ideas and entertainment. Five centuries ago, Gutenberg's advances in printing helped lead to the Reformation (by permitting people to own their own Bibles and religious tracts), the Renaissance (by permitting ideas to travel from village to village) and the rise of individual liberty (by allowing ordinary folks direct access to information). Likewise, the 20th century was transformed by a string of inventions that, building on the telegraph and telephone of the 19th century, led to a new information...
...known as special relativity. It was confirmed in spectacular fashion in 1919, when a British expedition to West Africa observed a slight shift in the position of stars near the sun during an eclipse. Their light, as Einstein had predicted, was bent as it passed the sun. Here was direct evidence that space and time are warped, the greatest change in our perception of the arena in which we live since Euclid wrote his Elements about...
...mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
...breaking through the stilted conventions of medieval art, bringing his neighbors into direct communion with the sacred, Giotto single-handedly elevated painting from the service of symbolism to the mirror of mankind...