Word: exceptional
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...relativism--that is, the idea that moral and ethical truth exists in the point of view of the beholder--owed nothing to Einstein (who believed the opposite), except a generalized homage to revolutionary thought. Art's elimination of semblances to the physical world corresponded vaguely with Einstein's way of seeing time and space, but it really sprung from an atmosphere of change, in which Einstein was yoked with Freud, Marx, Picasso, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Kafka, Duchamp, Kandinsky and anyone else with original and disruptive ideas and an aggressive sense of the new. By that tenuous connection did the discoverer...
...flesh-and-blood Gandhi was a most unlikely saint. Just conjure up his portrait: a skinny, bent figure, nut brown and naked except for a white loincloth, cheap spectacles perched on his nose, frail hand grasping a tall bamboo staff. This was one of the century's great revolutionaries? Yet this strange figure swayed millions with his hypnotic spell. His garb was the perfect uniform for the kind of revolutionary he was, wielding weapons of prayer and nonviolence more powerful than guns...
...half-brother grabbed a fish he had hooked, Temujin would kill the offending sibling in a hail of arrows. He never showed remorse. His mother was furious at the waste of a potential soldier in the revenge she envisioned. "We have no one to fight with us," she hectored, "except our own shadows...
...because the universalist desire to reform all culture, make everyone see in a new way, is dead. What's true of literature is true of all the arts now: there are readers of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born with...
Notoriously parsimonious--except for her own fashions--Elizabeth hated war for its costly wastefulness, yet embroiled England ineffectually in the long Continental struggles of the Counter-Reformation. When the Catholic threat of Spain reached its apogee in 1588, her penny pinching nearly cost England its independence before luck and the skill of her sailors defeated the Spanish armada. Yet at the moment of imminent invasion, she dressed in a silver breastplate to address her troops and imbue them with her dauntless courage. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," Elizabeth said, "but I have...