Word: penumbra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...predict how hot the world will be in the next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...right of a woman to choose an abortion is nowhere in the actual text of our Constitution; it was found by the Supreme Court in a constitutional "penumbra" known as the right of privacy, which was first established to protect the use of birth control. But the Constitution explicitly and augustly ratifies "free exercise" of religion and "freedom of speech" in the First Amendment. A religiously-inspired refusal to help pay for elective abortions is an exercise of religion, and a denial by government of an exemption must survive "strict scrutiny," which is the same standard applied to state-sanctioned...
...refusal to pay for elective abortions also falls within the immediate penumbra of the free-speech right not to be forced to, as Supreme Court justices proclaimed, "confess by word or act" any particular view of "politics, nationalism, religion or other matter of opinion." The Supreme Court has protected under this aspect of free speech a Jehovah's Witness's refusal to salute the American flag and a refusal to carry a license plate with a libertarian state motto...
...upon/ and we've moved on to the electric chair"--and then shifts easily to an image of digging deeper to uncover cultural truths "beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals/ beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels." It's a smart offering that rests comfortably in the penumbra between spoken word and song...
...fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built into the penumbra--glowing, and yet after all these years possessing the consistency of solid concrete--that surrounds the work...