Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...harbor large populations of drug-resistant bacteria, since the less hardy microbes are wiped out by the drugs. Opponents of the feed practice argue that even with relatively clean handling and packaging conditions, these bacteria could be transferred to meat and poultry products and eventually wind up in the human gastrointestinal tract. There they could pass on their defensive plasmids to resident bacteria in the gut. One strong piece of evidence: people who are often in contact with drug-containing animal feed or raw meat, like workers on farms or in slaughterhouses, have more drug-resistant bacteria in their intestines...
...timidity of modern textbooks, inevitable in books more concerned with commerce than with quality. But in some ways she is as divided as the texts she writes about. "All of us children of the 20th century know, or should know," she writes, "that there are no absolutes in human affairs." Today's textbooks do, fairly accurately, reflect that knowledge and mirror the confused national mood. The collapse of American confidence reflected in the histories since the 1960s is the product of the pluralism of values that FitzGerald somewhat ironically espouses...
...season of dance in Paris. The jaded city was ripe for an invasion of exotica. His company, to the frenzied rhythms of the Polovtsian dances from Borodin's Prince Igor, swept Paris like a Mongol invasion. Next came Scheherazade, with its orgy of writhing dancers, the extraordinary half human, half feline Golden Slave portrayed by Nijinsky, and the unexpected colors of Bakst. That was succeeded by the most famous opening-night brawl in history, when a glittering crowd booed Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Nijinsky, who choreographed the Rite, was forced to stand on a chair backstage...
Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners...
...second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict...