Word: givens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Born Wong Min-yee, she goes by her given Christian name, Harriet, and her husband's family name, Watt. Upon graduation from St. John's University in Shanghai, she landed a job trading gold bullion on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. After she fled her homeland, she served as business manager in TIME's Hong Kong and Tokyo bureaus. Watt arrived at the magazine's New York City office in 1956, became an American citizen and continued rising through the business-side ranks. By the late 1960s she had consolidated her hold on our spending habits and our hearts...
Obviously, the printed page, the linear medium, divorces information from time: one can go back and reread and think more and read again, because the words are frozen upon the page and therefore have a sort of timeless status. TV rushes headlong through real time, and given the constrictions of schedule, it is often a second-rate instrument with which to pursue the truth. The written word can commit the profoundest treacheries with the truth, but the hope of writing is at least to preserve the active integrity of the brain that is receiving the words. Television, flowing into...
...years ago, Hawking's voice had deteriorated to a labored moan that only his family and a few associates could understand; one of them always stood close by to interpret his words. Then, in 1985, after Hawking nearly suffocated during a bout with pneumonia, he was given a tracheostomy that enabled him to breathe through an opening in his throat and a tube inserted into his trachea. The operation saved his life but silenced his voice. Now he "speaks" only by using the slight voluntary movement left in his hands and fingers to operate his wheelchair's built-in computer...
...those less given to ice worship, the historical approach may prove equally illuminating. Consider the early Arctic explorers, their heroic exploits, their terminal frostbite. Cultivate a noble and stoic reserve. Look hungrily about you--after all you have been subsisting exclusively on stewed husky for the last few weeks. Perhaps that light ahead is your next food depot. Perhaps you are going snow blind. What if your frostbite gets worse and your toes drop off? Where are all the Eskimos...
...exciting Crimson freshman who leads the squad in scoring and rebounding had given Briggs fans a sneak preview of greatness. But they were still waiting for the complete play...