Word: grim
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...Three months later, and the human race is entrenched in a battle with the H1N1 2009 pandemic virus, with infections reported in 168 countries. In this mortal contest, it's the job of Daniels and his fellow virologists to decode the opponent's playbook. Working in a grim, 1930s building in London's northern suburbs (its exterior was used to portray an insane asylum in the blockbuster Batman Begins), scientists at the World Influenza Centre receive virus samples from around the world and use sophisticated machinery to map their genetic structures. During normal years, the scientists concoct the recipe that...
...this year, jumping from 741 to 904. When burial costs exceeded $1 million in the 2003-04 fiscal year, the agency turned to cremating the unclaimed unless it could be determined that burial was required because of religious or other beliefs. Each cremation costs $425 to $475. (Read a grim story of unearthed graves outside Chicago...
...that doesn't mean there aren't grim pockets elsewhere. By the end of March 2011, Deutsche Bank projects, 65% of borrowers in the Chicago metro area, 71% of those in the Baltimore and Portland, Ore., areas, and 77% in greater New York City will be underwater. On paper, that might look a lot better than the 93% Deutsche Bank is expecting for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the 92% figure for El Centro, Calif. But to the people living in those houses, unable to move, the relative good fortune will likely be little consolation...
...research for a couple of years in order to invent my fictional version of 1848 - the year Heyday begins - I became even more attuned to the arcs and patterns of history. Indeed, I became hopelessly addicted to the Long View. Last fall, as Wall Street crashed and a very grim New York City future looked very plausible, my historian's tic kicked in again. In my New York magazine column I compulsively imagined the present from the future as a memory of the recent past...
...came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your face. It's a spook show too tawdry to be frightening, one that takes place in threadbare rooms and in rag-barrel costumes, but that's the point. In Ensor the dramas of existence are mostly shabby ones. In Masks...