Word: humanities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...academics, of which any fool can find evidence by consulting the Sunday listings, began when human knowledge became so complex that the population was divided into two categories: the Expert and members of the general public. If the Expert's superior erudition fails to emerge during a program, we are told that we must blame its short duration--for there is seldom enough time. The general audience, blankly glazed before the home screen, is of course content to take the Expert's credentials as sufficient evidence that whatever he says is accurate. Whereas the humble citizen can express only opinions...
...home or near the point of consumption; more and more is shipped great distances, takes longer to reach the table, goes through increasingly complex processing to make prefabricated dishes or whole dinners for supermarket dispensers. Simultaneously, chemical manufacturers have been synthesizing new substances whose long-range effects on the human body are not yet known...
...kept in individual cages. They stick their heads out to feed from a continuously filled feed trough, turn around to a drinking fountain, drop their eggs on the inclined wire floor. The eggs roll outside through an automatic counter onto a conveyor belt that takes them to a human sorter who puts them in boxes. Another conveyor belt takes away the droppings. One man can easily take care of 7,000 birds with an output of 4,000 eggs a day. Outside each cage is the laying record. When this drops, the hen goes to the stewing...
...There are three things which are real," Indian-Irish Author Aubrey Menen once wrote, "God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third." Urbane Satirist Menen has siphoned laughter out of stuffy pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches') and sacred Hindu myths (The Ramayana). Rarely has his comic touch been lighter or more impolite than in this current spoof on science...
Comrade Venka, written during the temporary thaw after Stalin's death, was a big bestseller in Russia. Its plea for ordinary human decency is commonplace, but its point that party realism results in cruelty is so carefully spelled out that no Russian reader could have missed it. Unlike Boris Pasternak, his neighbor in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, Novelist Nilin attempted no sweeping indictment of Communist inhumanity. Still, his little, almost boyish novel may be read as a sign that many Russians have their doubts about the Communist world...