Word: flatness
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...expected frenetic activity of an election engine in the final throes of the campaign season. At lunchtime, waiters run up and down the stairs bearing massive trays of steaming pullau - the near national dish of rice cooked with hunks of lamb, carrots and raisins - and towering stacks of flat bread to every room of the four-story building. Nearly 500 campaign workers are ensconced in this former hotel, busily counting down the handful of days before Afghanistan goes to the polls on Aug. 20. Once considered a long shot - in May, before the campaign season officially started, Abdullah polled merely...
...generation of smartbooks and other mobile Internet devices but also keep them on the wide-open Google Web. That's why it announced the Chrome operating system last month. (I think the common wisdom - that this was a move aimed mainly at the king of operating systems, Microsoft - is flat-out wrong. Getting into mobile operating systems is a defensive move for Google, not an offensive one.) (Watch TIME's video about the Palm Pre vs. the iPhone...
...fans of the practice that they have a hard time paying for a hotel, the concept may sound dicey to the uninitiated. What about theft? Damage? Reasonable causes for concern, but equally unlikely. "Nobody is going to fly across the ocean or drive 600 miles to come steal your flat-screen TV," says Tony DiCaprio, president of 1stHomeExchange.com a four-year-old site that has seen membership increase 30% this year. Remember, he notes, "at the same time they're staying in your home, you are staying in their home...
This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
Talk to any doctor, however, and he or she will tell you flat out, the risk far outweighs any benefit. "There are so many other forms of getting vitamin D that are healthier than a tanning booth," says Dr. Ellen Marmur, chief of the division of dermatologic and cosmetic surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. "Go for a 10-minute walk three times a week or eat salmon or tuna or eggs or fortified cereal. You don't need to use a dangerous habit like a tanning booth to get vitamin...