Word: pendulum
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...THOSE WHO thought that the nature-nurture controversy was settled with E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature, think again. The flurry of sociobiological literature which followed the publication of Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book has since died down, it seems, and the pendulum might just be swinging the other way Richard Lewontin's new book. Not in Our Genes--which he co-authored with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin--presents the other side of the debate over genetic determinism...
Book burning by censors of the Roman Catholic Church sputtered out long ago. The Index of Prohibited Books, and other means of limiting what the faithful were permitted to read, faded away during and after the Second Vatican Council. Now, however, there are small signs that the pendulum is swinging back slightly. No flames of outright censorship are visible, but a purifying heat seems to be coming out of Rome. For the first time in 17 years, two books, one of them the bestselling adult catechism in English and the other a lesser-known theological work used mainly in seminaries...
...Baur and Lloyd Goodrich, was hardly more beaten than Lewis and Clark's. It was as though, by general consent, all American art had been sunk in earnest provinciality until the 1940s, when abstract expressionism unburdened itself upon the world stage. Nobody believes this today. In fact, the pendulum has gone so far in the other direction that a sea piece by any Boston dauber distantly connectable to Fitz Hugh Lane will command a price that not so long ago would have seemed too much for Turner. No vignette, however treacly, of apple-cheeked infants at the log schoolhouse...
...game's appeal is far less obscure than most of the questions. It derives from the pleasure of playing against people armed not with joy sticks but with arsenals of minutiae. Notes John Nason, vice president of marketing at Selchow & Righter: "The pendulum's swinging back from video games. With a video game you sit alone in a corner. Playing a board game there is interaction-moaning, groaning, laughter...
Just how far the pendulum has swung is evident in Available Light, which travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month. Childs, who collaborated earlier with fellow avant-gardists such as Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo...