Word: planet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...discouraging signs, the continuing failure to make real progress on decreasing the risk of nuclear conflict remains the most disturbing. The dangers have long been common knowledge: the slaughter of hundreds of millions, the collapse of civilizations and perhaps the destruction of whole regions of the planet. Popular sentiment in this country and in Europe has finally mounted in organized opposition to these risks. Yet beneath the rhetorical softening of American and Soviet positions lurks the firm conviction that there is greater security in the current standoff than in perhaps allowing the other side to sneak into a position...
...once it is not an obscure virus from a faraway planet that threatens the good starship Enterprise. No, this time the malaise comes aboard in Admiral Kirk's ditty bag, and it is that common cold of the earthling's psyche, a mid-life crisis. Since his promotion to flag rank, he has been deskbound and restless. For his latest birthday "Bones" McCoy has presented him with a pair of granny glasses for his failing eyes, a bottle of booze to lift his sagging spirit. Meanwhile, there is unfinished business that ought to be attended to: a grown...
...someone to pull the cork. It happens that Khan, played by Ricardo Montalban, who appears delighted to send his dinner jacket to the cleaners and slip into something scruffy, blames Kirk for all his troubles. It seems the captain marooned him, his family and crew on a forbidding planet 15 years earlier. Now he decides to invade the space platform where Kirk's scientist son and his scientist mother are engaged in good works, creating nothing less than a new Garden of Eden. By capturing Kirk's family, Khan hopes to lure his old enemy into a fatal...
...sort easily comprehended by any three-year-old. In light of such limitations, people who worry about the advent of even mildly intelligent machines are like alchemists who have not turned a single pebble into gold but are already concerned about the risk of transmuting the whole planet...
...metaphysics of travel has changed. Television turns us all into what the author Paul Fussell calls "stationary tourists," electronic cosmopolites. The webbing of satellites around the planet, the "remote feeds" from almost anywhere, give us the illusion that we are world travelers, or at least that we are all caught in the planetary claustrum and interconnection. National Geographic specials take us farther, more vividly, than we would have the courage or knowledge to go if we were traveling in body, not just in mind. The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in ragtop native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate...