Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sicilian Mafia, founded in the mid-19th century as a protection racket in Palermo, is the master template of the modern organized-crime network. Yet its success is grounded in paradox. Cosa Nostra is a multinational conglomerate based in the backwater of Sicily, an organization bred in violence that accumulates power best when it maintains internal peace. It is an association of men - sometimes men of extraordinary influence and charisma - yet the Thing is always bigger than even its most powerful bosses...
American higher education in 2007 is in a state of paradox – at once celebrated and assailed. A host of popular writings from the 1980s on have charged universities with teaching too little, costing too much, coddling professors and neglecting students, embracing an “illiberalism” that has silenced open debate. A PBS special in 2005 described a “sea of mediocrity” that “places this nation at risk.” A report issued by the U.S. Department of Education last year warned...
Logically, and medically, patients who need transfusions - those with low blood counts - should benefit immediately from a transfusion of new oxygen-laden red blood cells. Yet many get sicker. Puzzled by the paradox, Stamler and his colleagues decided to look more closely at banked blood - to figure out whether it underwent certain changes that turned it from life-saving in the donor to potentially deadly...
...ceiling of the Tate's immense Turbine Hall in mirror foil, added an artificial sun of 200 yellow lightbulbs arranged behind translucent plastic and periodically filled the upper air with mist. During the installation's six-month run, more than 2 million people filed in to enjoy the paradox of the outdoors brought indoors, to lie gazing upward at their reflection in the mirrored "sky" and to meditate on how we can submit ourselves to illusions even when we know that's what they...
...cooperate with the Times other than to say she did nothing illegal, did not respond to my e-mail request for comment. Nor did her lawyer. But in talking with other survivors who knew her, and looking back on my own notes, I am struck by the paradox of her case. After 9/11, there were thousands of stories of suffering, each exquisitely painful. But Head's tragedy was different. It was a story of surviving one tower - only to be metaphorically crushed by another. And ironically, it may have been the unimaginable scale of her suffering that gave...