Word: magic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lament over the decline of the railways, Arlo Guthrie in 1972 sang of the train the City of New Orleans passing "trains that have no name" and "the graveyards of the rusted automobile" while onboard the "magic carpet made of steel" sat "mothers with their babes asleep...rockin' to the gentle beat and the rhythm of the rails is all they feel." The City of New Orleans that left Chicago three minutes behind schedule last Monday night promised prouder vistas as it coursed along the Mississippi: historic Cairo, the blues from Beale Street in Memphis and, as finale...
...Wilson a "blind, deaf Don Quixote" and Clemenceau a xenophobe with "one illusion--France, and one disillusion--mankind" (and only at the last moment scratching the purple prose he had reserved for Lloyd George: "this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity"), an outraged Keynes prophesied that the reparations would keep Germany impoverished and ultimately threaten all Europe...
...recall with great fondness my first visit to Nairobi in 1970 when Louis ceremoniously led me to the room housing the crown jewels of human evolution. Every fossil took on a mythical cast as he waxed eloquent about how it revealed some magic moment of our origins. Here he was, the grand master, sharing his passion, knowledge and intuition with a new disciple. He was often like that: generous, open, supportive, always trying to win new converts to his way of working, his way of interpreting the past. Born in Kenya of English missionaries, Louis was initiated by tribal elders...
...such a simple shift of perspective, Godel wrought deep magic. The Godelian trick is to imagine studying what might be called "Martian-producible numbers" (those numbers that are in fact theorems in the Martian textbooks), and to ask questions such as, "Is or is not the number 8030974 Martian-producible (M.P., for short)?" This question means, Will the statement '8030974' ever turn up in a Martian textbook...
...surprisingly, the magic contraceptive bullet was an instant best seller. Within five years, 5 million women were taking it, a number that exploded over the next decade as baby boomers reached sexual maturity. Better formulations were soon developed to minimize the danger of blood clots and other worrisome side effects. But some health risks could not be foreseen, and as the 1980s dawned, bringing with it AIDS and a sharp increase in other sexually transmitted diseases, the smart new sexual freedom that the Pill permitted started to seem not so smart. As a result, the humble condom made a comeback...