Word: flicker
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jeffersonian? You must pick your Jefferson. Every other American statesman, Henry Adams wrote, could be portrayed "with a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of semitransparent shadows...
According to Grass, "literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect...How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism?...But when the light finally did brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically doable, to economic and social progress, a reason that claimed to be enlightened but that merely drummed a reason-based jargon (which amounted to instructions for progress...
...began trying to persuade us to, say, associate the Roman numeral 2000--MM--with a certain candy-coated chocolate. Even the Y2K problem has morphed from potential cataclysm to commercial punch line: a Nike ad shows a man going for a jog New Year's morning as the lights flicker out around town, money shoots out of ATMs, people panic in the streets, and an errant missile zooms by overhead. On the one hand, the passing of a thousand years is staggering for a mortal of perhaps 80 years' life-span to apprehend; on the other, its commercialization renders...
...Marshall Islands, where a Navy fighter pilot loses control of his computer-assisted jet and plunges to his death. In Scandinavia a nuclear power plant suffers a sudden, deadly meltdown. And at midnight in Times Square in New York City celebration turns to riot when the lights flicker...
...encounter with tequila that had its most lasting effect. That entire summer after I returned from Mexico, I didn't think. I would sit on buses and have not a single thought flicker on my screen. Emptiness, numbness. I had never felt it before. I loved...