Word: learnedly
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...beauty and value of books. Amy is an obsessive reader - "Young lady, close that book!" her aunt snaps at her in the second chapter of The Maze of Bones. Likewise, one of the novel's key scenes takes place in grandmother Grace's secret library. "She loved books," we learn. "She loved them very much." But would Amy or Grace have picked up The Maze of Bones? Scholastic's strategy seems to be predicated on the idea that kids don't actually like to read at all, that they have to be bribed to do it with trading cards...
...think you can learn from history. When I started reading, I got interested in the Barbary Wars, when extreme Muslim pirates were capturing our ships and holding them for ransom. Congress decided to negotiate with the Barbary pirates, and Tripoli started a war with us anyway. It was interesting reading about this situation where we dealt with extremists 200 years ago, and thinking about where...
Economist Robert Shiller has a new book out. You'll be thrilled to learn that it doesn't contain any warnings about a looming market crash. Well, unless you count that bit about the "train of catastrophes" that might ensue if current efforts to stabilize the financial system fail. But that's not really a prediction...
...life, but you're just getting started. Next you shepherd your fledgling life-form through its single-celled stage until it's ready to crawl onto land, at which time you decide where its various eyes and ears and limbs and less easily identifiable appendages go. Then it must learn to feed itself and reproduce. Eventually, it forms tribes and builds cities. Finally it achieves spaceflight, whereupon you guide it off into the galaxy to meet other sentient species...
...accustomed, after centuries of experience, to ambitious fathers whose parental failures are glossed over and swept under the rug by devoted wives and complicit courtiers; we only learn about the train wrecks of famous families when we read the memoirs. When a man at the height of his powers announces he will be Spending More Time with His Family, it translates as: he messed up big-time, didn't have what it takes...