Word: grid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...atomic era. The 1979 near meltdown at Three Mile Island spawned new safety regulations. The catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986 set off a public outcry in most of Western Europe, forcing some governments to curtail nuclear programs -- but not France. Five reactors will be added to the national grid in this decade. The Superphenix fast-breeder reactor, a joint venture with Italy and Germany, is working, though it has been dogged by technical problems and will never recover its $4.5 billion development cost...
...still as much in fashion as fashion is the ultimate philosophy. Together with modern farms, a medieval patchwork of agriculture still yields its plenty to cordon bleu tables in a country better prepared for the 21st century than most -- a land crisscrossed by bullet trains, a nuclear-electric power grid, Airbus jetliners and satellites borne aloft in Ariane rockets...
...that Saddam in contrast was deliberately putting them in harm's way by placing military installations in schools, homes and residential areas; and that much of the tragedy resulted because civilian and military targets are often one and the same. An obvious example: knocking out a country's electric grid cuts off the power to army bases, airports and military computers, but also to schools, homes and hospitals, and the engineers killed in the bombing of generating plants are likely to be civilians...
...cities, Sennett argues, obliterate value instead of creating it. Beguilingly democratic, they neutralize unequal and unpredictable landscapes with grid patterns that provide useful chessboards for economic competition. The standardizing grids expand not just outwards, but upwards, in skyscrapers whose sixth floors and 60th floors are identical, as well as across time, thanks to the modern invention of clocks to "cut time into meaningless fragments of deadening routine...
Like many New Yorkers, Sennett sometimes fails to put the city in context. Non-urban areas are blank spaces on his world map, merely waiting to be filled in by the encroaching grid. The city is never presented as an alternative location among many. Sennett's arguments would have been strengthened, for example, had he considered the role of the wilderness as the accepted zone for today's spiritual quests. Surely the modern citydweller's solitary journey to the mountains or the ocean in search of meaning and fulfillment is in a fundamental way a pessimistic, escapist denial...