Word: mirrored
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This cosmic vista, seen in a photo released by NASA two weeks ago, is the latest in a series of stunning images captured from the ends of the universe by the Hubble Space Telescope. Once written off as a near total loss because of an inaccurately ground mirror, the Hubble has in the past two years redeemed itself spectacularly. It has offered close-up pictures of distant galaxies that are 10 times as sharp as those produced by earthbound telescopes--pictures that are not just scientifically significant but breathtakingly beautiful as well. In fact, the orbiting observatory has extended...
...little more than five years ago, Bahcall was singing a much more melancholy tune. In May 1990, shortly after the Hubble went into orbit, engineers and scientists realized that something was horribly wrong. The telescope simply wouldn't focus properly--the result, it turned out, of a light-gathering mirror that had been ground with exquisite precision, but in the wrong shape. After a lengthy investigation, the disaster was laid to a simple, dumb mistake: a technician had assembled a device that guided the mirror-grinding process with one bolt put on backward. The hobbled Hubble could still do some...
...reading of anti-Semitism. Luckily, Israelis deny the kind of perverse logic that Rascoff offers. Most Israelis possess a healthy sense of their own identity and a firm enough grasp of the complexities of Israeli reality to avoid premature declarations of failure whenever the image they see in the mirror is not the loveliest of them...
...must accept it, though, when we remember those who have been cut down violently just as they have won a victory for righteousness: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Anwar Sadat. The Egyptian President--Rabin's mirror image in the Middle East conflict, killed not by his nominal enemies, but by those among his own people who accused him of treachery. Rabin joins the ranks of such men, and that is why his assassination causes such heartsickness. Dwell on the matter, and realism turns to despair--the good get shot, and the evil die in their beds...
Ashbery, whom Vendler credited with having "changed the genre of poetry," shared an anecdote from his art classes at Harvard and then read his "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror...