Word: humanism
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...York Measuring America Since 1990 the U.N. has published an annual human-development report sizing up nations' progress in ensuring their citizens' health, education and standard of living. In The Measure of America, social-science researchers used the same standards to put the U.S. under the microscope and came up with some striking results. While the U.S. ranks 12th globally for human development, many Americans are being left behind...
...Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s. Of course he was racist--at least for part of his life. And so is Huckleberry Finn, which is part of what makes the book so brilliant. The reader, through Huck, comes to see how absurd racism is, as Jim is fully humanized on their trip down the river together. Twain's point is that racism is socially conditioned and is contrary to the natural inclinations of the human heart. Huck defies the laws and customs of his people and acts with his individual conscience, which is what makes him such a great...
...been equally unlucky, leaving hotels that had expected to be bursting at the seams with occupancy rates under 50%. Organizers have been told unofficially that all outdoor gatherings in the months before the Games are banned. Clubs that had operated with impunity are suddenly having trouble with their licenses. Human-rights activists, public-interest lawyers and other dissenting voices have been jailed or harassed. Police even detained and interrogated members of the Hash House Harriers, a beery running club, suspicious that the flour they used to mark their runs might be part of a terrorist attack...
...pages), though Wood, as a book critic for the New Yorker, is the heavyweight of the field. These books fall into the curious netherworld of extra-academic literary theory. They are the last, depleted descendants of what used to be called aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that theorized the human response to works of art. For most intents and purposes, aesthetics collapsed in 1970 under the weight of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. What's left is books like How Fiction Works--which is, oddly, a delight, but not for the reason it's supposed...
...remember Jack Kevorkian, the pathological pathologist who, when he wasn't transfusing blood from corpses, refining his "mercitron" machine or arguing for an auction market for human organs, used to help people commit suicide in a rusty van in a public park. So maybe it's no surprise that in the Year of the Outsider, he's finally out of jail (eight years for second-degree murder) and running for Congress as an independent in the Fifth District in Michigan...