Word: fluxes
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...girl," says Naomi Shiraishi, who stood in line Saturday night buying special commemorative crackers near Masako's childhood home in Tokyo's Meguro ward. "I hope she gives it another shot, and that next time, it'll be a boy." Given Japan's current state of psychological flux and funk, a girl seems almost appropriate, certain to trigger soul searching and hand wringing about gender roles, about the long-term viability of the monarchy?in other words, to create one more muddle at a time when it seems that's what Japan does best...
...step into the same river twice. The philosopher Heraclitus came up with this limpid observation back in 5th century B.C. Greece to show that the world is in a permanent state of flux: the river looks unchanged, but its flow, its fish, the way it reflects light, are no longer as they were when we last visited. Although this awareness of transience has been around so long, we resist change, or at least we want it to be imperceptible, millimetric. This is how we manage to turn a blind eye to life's one immutable: death. We like our flux...
...themselves expand, the remaining unsullied stretches of undiscovered phenomena exist just where these blobs are about to merge with one another. The edges, the boundaries, the regions straddling two expanding scientific enterprises represent the cross-disciplinary jackpots of the 21st sanctuary. These are the wild fields, the fields in flux, the fields that make you want to ride on out on the range and pan for scientific gold...
...Indonesia, right now, may be the wobbliest "domino" in Southeast Asia, because of Jakarta's notoriously volatile domestic politics. Four years of economic meltdown and political flux has left the question of power in Indonesia - even of the archipelago's future integrity as a single nation state - dangerously unresolved. If the Islamic parties that previously conspired to keep President Megawati Sukarnoputri out of power use the unrest sparked by the Afghanistan raids to move against her once again, Jakarta could be in for another year of living dangerously...
...culture. Consider the modern novel. In the hands of a master like Philip Roth, it can register the smallest vibrations of the interior life or the broadest convulsions of the wider world. But when it emerged as an art form in the 18th century--springing from a flux of cheap pamphlets, folktales, adventurers' memoirs and religious allegories--it was widely despised as philistine trash, a plaything for an undiscriminating middle class that was hooked on gaudy sentiments and cliffhanger narrative. What we now know is that the verse play and epic poem were about to be shuffled to the margins...