Word: inertia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...said to speak for the student body because the students' representatives selected them. But if the nominations are conducted in secret, students at large exercise no formal influence over the selection. Secrecy prevents constituents from rewarding a wise choice of nominees or punishing a poor one; it encourages inertia rather than change and has no place in a representative system...
...Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study seems to me to be little more than a mockery of the old Radcliffe College. I blame institutional inertia for its continued existence, and I hope that president-elect Lawrence H. Summers will have to courage to call for its dissolution, which ought to have been accomplished during the Harvard-Radcliffe merger...
...they all needed? To some degree, the spy race is self-perpetuating: when your adversary has spies trying to gather information, you need more spies to counter them. "It's very much the inertia of the cold war," says a former intelligence officer. On the other hand, it would be naive to believe spying is merely a game of one-upmanship. The world is still a dangerous place--as anyone within range of North Korea's missiles or Osama bin Laden's terrorists knows...
...swept up in the thesis-crunch of February and March, carried away by the bacchanalian reprieve of April and May, and found myself nodding in agreement with the insurgent nostalgia of Senior Week and Graduation. It is hard to describe the whole experience; words fail to capture the emotive inertia that propels the last few months, here. It is something akin to the closing minute of the Beatles' song, "A Day in the Life." Over the course of a short time, so many moments conspire in a melody that rises to a fever pitch until that final instant when...
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and Russia's President, is a St. Petersburg native. He made his name as one of the energetic reformers who gave the city a rolling start as communism collapsed. But these days that momentum is gone, replaced by the languid inertia of drink, drugs and sex. Putin is desperate to change his country. The kids in these photos are desperate to change their lives. That should be a recipe for hope, but in this lawless, rotting city, it has become a prescription for despair...