Word: emperors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spread of Islamist violence in the name of God. The Pope's speech was provocative, and perhaps a necessary dose of high-level theology in the post-9/11 world. But it also provided evidence of his political naivete: Benedict cited an insulting statement by a 14th century Byzantine emperor about the prophet Muhammed. He later clarified that it did not reflect his thinking, but by then it had already sparked outrage...
...Emperor’s New Clothes: “Every onlooker knew that the king was naked, but they had no way of being sure that the others knew, and so were intimidated into silence. All it took was for one boy to say ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ and the crowd burst into laughter. Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each...
...These examples all have aspects of opinion leadership in them—perhaps we are being told to think abortion is acceptable, casual homophobia is wrong, and philanthropy is imperative. More likely, though, pop culture is reifying our already-shared but unexpressed belief that the emperor has no clothes...
...dynasties, Barbieri-Low - an assistant professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Santa Barbara - describes the frenetic Eastern Market of the Han capital of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an). Established in 201 B.C. by Liu Bang, the first Han Emperor, this shopper's paradise was surfeited with stalls hawking everything from silk to cheap tableware. At a whopping 5.4 million sq. ft. (500,000 sq m), it covered more space, as Barbieri-Low points out, than the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, the largest in the U.S. today. From a general reader's perspective...
...considered valuable property and used mostly for light or clerical duties. One to six convict laborers, on the other hand, died each day at a typical large imperial worksite, building roads, opulent palaces and tombs, including the most famous of all: the mausoleum of Qin Shihuangdi, the first Qin Emperor, who, in 221 B.C., unified China. Their lives were so cheap that a single convict graveyard near the mausoleum sprawled over 22 acres (nine hectares...