Word: ferments
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...more novel theories or spurred more far-flung expeditions. Life has occupied the planet for nearly 4 billion of its 4.5 billion years. But until about 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled algae and single-celled plankton. The first hint of biological ferment was a plethora of mysterious palm-shape, frondlike creatures that vanished as inexplicably as they appeared. Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within the span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions...
...MOVEMENT IS NO MERE rekindling of the '70s' Sagebrush Rebellion, although it does share the same goal of increasing local control over federal lands. Carver, who carries his Constitution in his shirt pocket even while baling hay, is a product of the same antifederalist ferment that produced such widely divergent events as the Oklahoma City bombing and Ross Perot's recent proposal to launch a new political party. Nye's particular brand of rebellion is driven too by an intense feeling that the combined forces of federal law, environmental activism and urban growth may have doomed a mythic frontier life...
...with the prevalent realisms of the 1930s and '40s in American painting. That is to say, it had no persuasive content; it was entirely free from ideology, left or right. He had studied painting with Robert Henri, whose politics were romantically anarchist. But none of the political ferment of pre-World War I New York rubbed off on him, and none shows in his work. The only painting in this show that could be guessed to show an industrial worker is Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947; and the bald man is posed like Millet's peasant with a hoe, raking grass...
...drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from Albert Finney...
...future. He is a passionate, tormented idealist, still roiled by the Western liberal notions of social and political freedom that had swept the Russian intelligentsia a generation before. But the new, younger Russian intellectuals are not liberals; they are nihilists and anarchists, and Dostoyevsky is repelled and shaken. This ferment will result, two years later, in the towering "pamphlet-novel" variously called The Devils, The Possessed and (in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Demons -- the demons being the indigestible Western ideas that were unsettling Russia...