Word: mightly
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...going to have government by the people, you need to know who and where they are. The founders stuck a Census requirement in the Constitution so that every 10 years, the young, stretchy country would recalculate which states got how many lawmakers. They worried that a state might try to inflate its population to increase its representation, so they cleverly arranged that the first Census would also be used to spread around the costs of the Revolution. In 1790, 650 federal marshals on horseback began going house to house. It cost $45,000 and took a year and a half...
...when word went out that Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, would be about global warming, climate researchers might have hoped they'd found their champion. With his portrait of a relentlessly rational science writer in Enduring Love and his detailed descriptions of neurosurgery in Saturday, McEwan is the rare novelist who understands the scientific world - and the mind-set of the scientist. If anyone could make a best seller out of the sticky stuff of climate science and a hero out of one of its practitioners, it would be McEwan. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...turns out, they might want to wait for Al Gore's next book. McEwan has turned his sharp, satirical eye to climate change, and the result is anything but heroic. In making Solar a comedy - albeit one as black as the dark side of the moon - McEwan gives the lie to vain hopes that the planet will be saved by a sudden outbreak of environmental virtue. If we're going to avoid choking on what McEwan calls the "hot breath of civilization," we're going to have to harness human nature, in all its selfishness, mendacity - and occasional genius...
...Artificial photosynthesis is a real idea, although it's further from deployment than the novel suggests. McEwan's background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating...
...blanks ourselves. In her new book, Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller gives it a go, investigating the different concepts of eternity held by the world's most prominent religions and talking to religious scholars, pastors, monks and common folk alike to get a better idea of what heaven might be. For some, it's "a place that embodies the best of everything" and is full of "green, green pastures," while for others it is simply "the home of God." Naturally, Miller doesn't come to a neat conclusion about what to expect when our last breath arrives. But she does...