Word: ironizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Almost all of the cosmic matter that survives to hit the Earth is nothing more than a curiosity. A mysterious lump of iron is found in a cornfield; a twenty-two pound rock appears amid the demolished trunk of a car in Peekskill, New York just last year. The Harvard Geological Museum contains dozens of examples, carefully classified by composition, ranging from a few ounces to over a hundred pounds...
...controversial theory by posing an age-old question: Why do women menstruate at all? As a means of disposing of unfertilized eggs and a plumped-up uterine lining, a monthly flow seems peculiarly wasteful. Women shed a great deal of blood and tissue, as well as valuable nutrients, particularly iron. "If menstruation were both costly and functionless," reasons Profet, "natural selection surely would have eliminated it long ago." Its persistence suggests that it offers some advantage...
...relatives no longer live in the same comfort they once enjoyed. All of their windows now have bars, their doors have iron gates, and their automobiles have alarm systems. All South Africans, whether they be white, colored, Indian or Black, are feeling the effects of increased lawlessness. Johannesburg, the country's largest city, was recently pronounced the murder capital of the world. Its per capita death rate due to violent crime far exceeds those of both New York and Los Angeles. The violence is especially pronounced in some townships. In Soweto, one two-week period witnessed the killing of over...
...major difficulty, of course, is a pervasively corrosive attitude that is typical of our times. In our Iron Age, the concept of liberal education tends to be no longer even mentioned, let alone understood. Once this concept is lost, education becomes a mere commodity, to be evaluated in material terms. Then the word shopping in the expression shopping period becomes an ominous sign of unmitigated materialism, as if all that mattered were the usefulness of education for one's immediate or ultimate material well-being...
...eccentric machines aren't so overblown as this. The image of sex-as-mechanism is one of the oldest tropes in modern art. A century has passed since Joris-Karl Huysmans, the "decadent" novelist, invited the reader to see the workings of an engine as "steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets"; the idea of a "desiring machine" has been explored by a lot of art since then, from early Picabia and Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), through the Surrealists in the '30s, and so down...