Word: notion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sure, Uncle Sam twists the tax code to favor buying - and to reinforce the notion that owning a house is synonymous with the American Dream. But is it? "Moving up in the world and attaining material and nonmaterial success - that was always the American Dream," says Phelps. "That didn't necessarily mean you owned your house...
...Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance (MIRA) and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose lawyers say they can't comment on its specifics because of a judge's gag order. But Mary Bauer, the SPLC's legal director, says that on a general level, any notion that a mother can lose custody of a child because she doesn't speak a particular language "is a fundamentally outrageous violation of human rights." (Read "When Motherhood Gets You Jail Time...
...This notion - that in times of change, we seek the comfort of what we know - repeatedly shows up in culture. You see it in ads for comfort foods and household products, and you also see it in high culture. In Anna Karenina, when Konstantin Levin goes home to the countryside from Moscow after his marriage proposal is rebuffed, Levin feels the confusion of his life "gradually clearing up and the shame and dissatisfaction with himself going away." (See nine kid foods to avoid...
Depth PerceptionThe notion of a tsunami engulfing a village has to be startling to Asian viewers, who surely recall the devastation wreaked by the December 2004 Indian Ocean disaster. But in the movie, it's as if Sosuke's town has just gone through a cleansing car wash. "Rather than the tsunami destroying the town," Miyazaki says, "I took it as her own sense of life overflowing, and that helped to revitalize the town. None of the buildings were destroyed in the flood. You can see them all beneath the water. That's magic...
...study reconfirms the notion that imitation is not uniquely human (past research has also shown that apes and monkeys easily recognize when they are being copied), and that our affinity for it may have roots in our evolution. What has never been precisely understood, though, is why we like to be parroted so much. One theory is that mimicry somehow promotes safety in groups of animals by binding them together - that mimicry is a kind of social glue. (Read what fat-bellied monkeys tell us about our own social stress...