Word: planes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...screenplay by phone with its writers and jotting notes while glancing at an incoming e-mail on her BlackBerry, motioning signals to her assistant and firing off an instant message to a studio exec. "Here's how bad it is," she confesses. "When I'm flying, right before the plane lands, before the seat-belt sign goes on, I get the BlackBerry out and put it in front of me in the seat-back compartment. That way I can turn it on as soon as I land and see that little light flashing...
Indeed, there's a compulsive quality to our relationships with digital devices. Hallowell has noticed that when a plane lands nowadays, BlackBerrys light up the way cigarettes once did. "A patient asked me," he says, "whether I thought it was abnormal that her husband brings the BlackBerry to bed and lays it next to them while they make love." Hallowell and his frequent collaborator, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, believe that the neurochemistry of addiction may underlie our compulsive use of cell phones, computers and "CrackBerrys." They say that dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in seeking rewards and stimulation, is doubtless...
Orman, who has neither a husband nor children to distract her, takes single- mindedness to an almost unimaginable extreme. "When I'm on a plane on the way to a speaking engagement, you cannot talk to me about another project. All I'm doing is thinking about that speech. That way, when I get there, everything is very clear." On a recent 14-day world tour, she says, she didn't pick up a single e-mail or voice message: "Then, bam, it was done, and now that I'm back, I have picked up with what I need...
...traders and flight attendants. For a brief cultural moment, 9/11 turned average Americans into coal miners; that is, it suddenly became plausible to ask, "If I die today doing this job, will it have been worth it?" But unlike the the horror of 9/11, when millions watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center on live TV, a mine collapse is horrifying for the opposite reason: we see nothing and hear nothing. A group of men is either alive or dead and?in this age of GPS locators, instant messaging and Google Earth?thousands of feet of antediluvian rock...
When Amitav Ghosh clambers into a tiny relief plane in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, just six days after the 2004 tsunami devastated the area, he finds himself next to a loud, officious-seeming, irascible man in a safari suit, his hair carefully oiled. The visiting writer tries to sidle away, but soon his obstreperous neighbor is sharing his complaints with him. Only as they continue talking does Ghosh begin to realize that the man is, in fact, an epidemiologist, and has lost his wife, his daughter, the whole careful life he has built up, in the tragedy. The loudness...