Word: hannah
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...Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel's Arab leadership generally opposes the state being defined on Jewish lines, instead demanding that it treat all citizens as equals. For Lieberman, the last straw was the opposition expressed by Israeli Arabs to the military campaign in Gaza. But Hannah Safran, a protester outside a Lieberman rally in the port town of Haifa, which has many Arabs, says, "Many of our politicians are racist against Arabs, but didn't dare speak it aloud. But Lieberman does. It's what we get for years of saying that we had nobody...
Take these two specimens. Hannah Holmes is a tall, blond, personally assertive science journalist. Temple Grandin is an eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually...
...same day Hannah Mighall, 13, was surfing in Binalong Bay off the Tasmanian coast in Australia's far south when she screamed and was dragged under the water by what authorities suspect was a large white pointer. Her cousin paddled to the injured girl and dragged her to safety while being circled by the shark. On Jan. 12, a man snorkeling in a tidal lake in New South Wales was bitten on the leg, probably by a bull shark. Authorities reported that the man punched the shark in the nose and made it to shore with about 40 puncture wounds...
...charges were purposefully subtler and the conditions less stressful. But the takeaway is no less disturbing: humanity's threshold for cruelty is, like everything else, situational. We seem wired to follow orders, even when they're harmful to others. In her chilling portrayal of Nazi middle-manager Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt famously excoriated this impulse as "the banality of evil." Evil is way too strong a word for the conduct of this study's participants, but it seems clear that despite all of humanity's horror shows over the past decades, we aren't getting the message...
...degree blur the inherent point of the exercise. In the end, Hanna's defense of her crime - she allowed most of her prisoners to die in a fire in a church (hard to imagine a more obvious choice of crime scene) - comes down to, well, yes, what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil...