Word: hewn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Immortalized on jukeboxes in a thousand honky-tonks, California's Folsom Prison is one of the U.S.'s best-known penitentiaries, and one of its worst. Hewn from local granite at the base of the Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento, Folsom dates back to the 1880s and for decades has been a squalid, antiquated mess. But its problems have become acute in the past ten years, as its population has swelled to 70% more than capacity and the rate of violent acts nearly tripled. This year three inmates have been killed and 130 others stabbed in unmanageable violence that...
Naked of walls and roof, the frame of foot-thick oak timbers has the precise, angular grace of a Victorian railway bridge. It is bound by hand-hewn pegs to a 20-ft. by 30-ft. rectangle. Inside this architectonic web freshly spun along the rear of the Bakers' blueberry-shingled farm house, Babcock, 50, in red plaid shirt and worn, blue work pants, ministers to a most ungraceful tangle of rope and wood...
...must have given a hundred talks," he remarks. "Each time I say the same thing: save the barns! People listen, but they don't act." On the Baker place, the sheep barn's rectangular skeleton now glows softly, a spare Doric temple in the twilight. Babcock touches the smoothly hewn frame with a hammer-size hand. "Look how carefully they worked. They thought they were building for the future." He brightens into a smile. "And today, we saved one. Gramps would be pleased." --By Kenneth W. Banta
...committed the sin of wanting something very badly. He drank! He did drugs! His youthful indiscretions and his youthful aimlessness made him seem like a regular, ambitionless guy. (And who needs ambition when you have a sense of entitlement?). Kerry’s ambition, meanwhile, you could see hewn into every anxious line in his long face...
Bili lies in Congo's far north, about 120 miles east of the Ebola River, where deep tropical forest breaks up into patches of savanna. Civil war and neglect have left the region nearly untouched by man. Overgrown dirt roads with bridges of rough-hewn logs string together thatched-roofed villages. Nearly all freight is carried in by bicycle. Locals hunt with homemade shotguns and crossbows seemingly modeled on 16th century Portuguese design. "This area is the last part of Africa where there are still wild animals," says Pontier, who grew up in the region. "It's not a game...