Word: isn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Somebody has probably already pointed out that the publication date of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code - March 18, 2003 - came just two days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That isn't a conspiracy, it's just a coincidence. But it does - as fans of The Da Vinci Code often say - make you think...
...mean something. Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is after all a symbologist (following a branch of human intellectual inquiry that - it cannot be stated enough times - doesn't exist, at Harvard or anywhere else). Beneath his learned, oddly asexual caress, objects come to life and become symbols. A V isn't just a V, it's a chalice, a symbol of the eternal feminine. Chaos is secretly order. Noise is secretly signal...
...here's the thing. It's easy to run Brown down, because his writing isn't very deft. He introduces new characters with a kind of electric breathlessness that borders on the inadvertently hilarious ("Newly hired security guard Alfonso Nuñez carefully studied the male visitor now approaching his checkpoint ..."). And the unfortunate sentence "His massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny" should itself be forcibly tattooed on Brown's massive sex organ. Worse, Brown's scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes what he reads in Wikipedia. In particular, the book suffers...
...Heinz, the point of the awards isn't just handing out money - although a six-figure check goes a long way in the weakly compensated world of environmental science and activism. Rather, she wants us to see those winners as role models at a time when news of the environment can seem unremittingly dark. "This is a message of hope," says Heinz. "I want this to push people into action...
...terrorized major cities, Pakistan, analysts say, can ill-afford a revival of sectarian violence that plagued the country during the 1980s, when Saudi-backed Sunni militant groups clashed with Iranian-backed Shi'ite ones as part of a regional proxy war. Says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent security analyst: "It isn't just Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan where Iran can create trouble if it wants...