Word: fragmentating
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...dangerous and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy. Yet the authors take pains to distance themselves from the small but vocal faction of extremists who hope that energy shortages will hold back technology, slow industrial growth, break up large industry and fragment society into smaller groups of people, tending their own gardens and building their own windmills. As the Harvard experts stress in Chapter One: "We do not side with those romanticists who have a vision of the national life decentralized in many spheres through the mechanism of the energy crisis...
Take, Thomas suggests, the case of the nudibranch (a sea slug) and the medusa (a jellyfish) that live in the Bay of Naples. The slug lives with a tiny fragment of the medusa permanently and parasitically attached near its mouth. The vestigial jellyfish apparently is still able to reproduce; its offspring swim off and become normal adult jellyfish. The slug also produces larvae, but these are rather quickly trapped and subsumed by the new jellyfish. Aha, one would think, the jellyfish are getting back at the slugs for prior mutilations. No such thing. "Soon the snails," Thomas writes, "undigested...
...Aegean, and its rolling, antique contours of moorland and coast, recur in hundreds of drawings and dozens of still-life and land scape paintings. Nicholson's favorite motif was that of the cubist Juan Gris: a view of objects on a table, vases, mugs, jugs, bowls, with a fragment of landscape seen through an open window behind, the two worlds - exterior and interior - compressed into a single overlapping image. Nothing is gratuitous, nothing fudged. The sharp pencil line - Blake's "hard and wirey line of rectitude" - engraves the surface with a kind of moral certainty. A work like...
...until the man has settled the bill. b) She offers the man a cigar, quarrels with the waiter's addition, pays the check from a roll of 50s and makes a knowledgeable remark about the vicissitudes of the Baltimore Colts. c) She extracts from her ice cream dish a fragment of broken glass brought along for just this purpose. She and her companion complain loudly about foreign objects in the food, and both exit in a huff, leaving the check unpaid on the table...
...super-reporter is at his best describing locales and the means travelers use to get from one to another. His chronicle of a voyage in an umiak, an open skin-covered Eskimo craft, from Nome to a fragment of rock called King Island, is a masterpiece of terse narrative and clinical observation. Without wasting a diphthong, Roueche captures the look and feeling of the gray ice-choked sea, the pleasant bite of whisky and the new taste of muktuk, or whale fat: "The blubber looked like a block of cheese-pale pink cheese with a thick black rind...