Word: hunch
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Dothan suspected that the antiquities came from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had also occupied during the war. She took her hunch to then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, an avid amateur archaeologist and collector. Three months later he not only told her where the Egyptian materials came from-how he found out he never revealed-but also provided a military escort to the site near the Arab town of Deir el Balah, about 18 miles southwest of Gaza...
Time: Nov. 30, 1974. Scene: the bleached and arid Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. Nothing about the desert seemed auspicious. Yet Anthropologist Donald Johanson had a premonition that this would be no ordinary morning. Shortly afterward, his hunch was ratified. The day was not merely unusual; it was epochal...
...free them. Speaking with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House last week, Jimmy Carter could not hide his chagrin over the seemingly endless cycle of raised expectations and dashed hopes. Said Carter: "Any prediction of a favorable response from Iran has always been mistaken." His hunch? "Wait and see." It has been that way now for more than 400 days...
...same desire to hunch the future led to the debacle of the pollsters at election time. In their own defense, pollsters have just about persuaded everyone that there was a dramatic change in voter opinion in the last week before the balloting. Even if this is true, however, of what use to anyone were the pollsters' "too close to call" findings just a week before an electoral landslide...
Still, reader curiosity about the future may be insatiable: How else explain the popularity of astrology columns? Probably the most ambitious and serious attempt to hunch the future was the Carnegie Corporation-financed Commission on the Year 2000, a gathering of distinguished scholars directed by Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell. It met in the '60s but petered out by 1972. "It makes no sense to predict the future," says Bell. "There are too many contingencies. What you can do is identify relevant frameworks, and identify problems-but you don't know what will be done about them, which...