Word: englands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...period consisted of this hidden autobiography," says leading Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. "That's a modern image of the writer as someone who puts his own experiences into his plays, a very romantic idea of writing. But it's just not how plays were written back then." (Read about England's 18th century Shakespeare hoax...
...book, A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark notes that the yawning chasm between rich and poor has been widening since the late 18th century. "Hundreds of millions of Africans now live on less than 40% of the income of pre-industrial England," he writes. Clark proposes a wildly contentious explanation for this disparity. By studying wills from England circa 1800, he finds that rich families tended to reproduce far more abundantly than poor ones. As the affluent outbred the poor, bourgeois values like thrift and literacy apparently diffused through English society from the top down, eventually jump-starting...
...survival of the richest, he terms it - it doesn't follow that genetics, rather than geography or blind luck, caused Europe to industrialize before the rest of the world. Isn't it just as likely that innovations such as the steam engine, and the exploitation of its colonies, made England wealthy? And Clark's social Darwinism doesn't explain why equally stable and sophisticated societies in China and India industrialized at different rates, or how they have managed to become capitalist powerhouses in only a generation. At best, A Farewell to Alms is woefully naive; at worst, willfully reductionist...
...fulfil their promise gloriously in this year's Rugby World Cup. At the Parc des Princes in Paris on Sept. 9, they trounced Samoa by the withering score of 59-7. Their star black player, Bryan Habana, scored four tries, fueling hopes that the team might triumph over England on Sept. 14 and ultimately make it to the final...
Pressed for posterity between two slabs of cardboard--on stationery the color of New England clam chowder--was a handwritten fan letter from the President of the United States. I was touched and flattered--my ego swelled like a self-inflating raft. But more important, the letter has served in the months since as a Rorschach test for everyone who reads it: a minireferendum on the presidency, a war in Iraq writ tiny--but legibly, and even grammatically, with impeccable spelling...