Word: grasp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inhumanly to man. At his offices in Kigali, President Paul Kagame says: "Hutu fathers killed their own children because some of them resembled their wives, who were Tutsi. How do you explain that?" Nations that haven't just peered into the abyss, but lived in it, have a tight grasp on the price of failure. Those that survive are duty-bound to do everything to avoid a repeat. So when Columbia University public health and development expert Ruxin, 37, arrived in Rwanda and asked where to set up the Millennium Villages Project, a program to end poverty in 80 villages...
...cannot learn a city or even try to understand a place—much less a language—in five weeks. It took me over two months to fully grasp the public transportation system in Buenos Aires. Even after five months, I still found myself susceptible to the city’s secrets and idiosyncrasies—secrets that do not reveal themselves in the intensive language classes and all-day curriculum of Harvard Summer School programs. The notion that one can experience a city and a culture in five whirlwind weeks of language classes...
...Then there's the apparent disconnect between the life that William Shakespeare lived and the ones he wrote about. Anti-Stratfordians claim that Shakespeare's plays show a keen grasp of literature, language, court life and foreign travel - not the kinds of things that a small-town actor without a university education would be familiar with. As the Declaration says, "scholars know nothing about how he acquired the breadth and depth of knowledge displayed in the works." And so doubting scholars look to well-traveled writers and aristocrats - essayist Francis Bacon; poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe; theater patron Edward...
...mind, and that in the absence of resuscitation, it's the brain's final sound and light show, followed by oblivion. Nonetheless, there's still no definitive explanation. There mightn't be a ghost in the machine. But it's a machine whose complexities remain well beyond our grasp...
...within the cozy traditions laid down by Charles Dickens and even Jane Austen. Theroux is the rare writer to see that the fascination, the power of India today, lies in the commute between the two. His characters begin in manicured, air-conditioned places, but it is the clammy grasp of desire, the smells and the slippery deals of the back alleyways, that really bring them out. The human bestiary has rarely found a more spirited observer...