Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...take this breast beating too far. Some writers in the appease-the- sisters branch of men's-movement literature hold that masculinity is a destructive atavism and an encumbrance that a small planet could do without. John Stoltenberg, a radical feminist who wrote a book called The End of Manhood, divides men into misogynists and recovering misogynists. "Manhood," he writes, "is the paradigm of injustice . . . Refusing to believe in manhood is the hot big bang of human freedom." Soft-core pamphleteering. Here we see the descendants of the ancient priests of Cybele, who as part of their initiation would castrate...
...true story about that kid who claimed to have encountered a space alien from the planet Zarg in William James Hall, and shortly after disappeared and was never heard from again...
...looking for explanations. Several suggested that astronomical cycles were involved, and by the 1930s the Yugoslav astronomer Milutin Milankovitch had constructed a coherent theory. The ice ages, he argued, were triggered by changes in the shape of the earth's slightly oval orbit around the sun and in the planet's axis of rotation. Studies of the chemical composition of ocean-floor sediments, which depend on climate conditions when the material was laid down, more or less supported Milankovitch's predicted schedule of global glaciation...
...reason to think the next full-fledged Ice Age is upon us, a shorter episode of frigid conditions could happen at any time. The last interglacial period was warmer than this one and also, arguably, more unstable. It is conceivable that the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill. And for an idea of what a mini-Ice Age might be like, just imagine last week's cold wave lasting all winter, every winter -- for the next thousand years...
California is an earthquake zone because it lies on the boundary, marked by the San Andreas Fault, between two huge sections of the earth's crust, known as plates. Gliding atop a sea of superheated rock that surrounds the planet's molten outer core, the Pacific plate -- a thick slab to which Los Angeles is attached -- is very slowly pushing its way north and west, past the North American plate to the east, which is moving in the opposite direction. Most of the time, in most places, the two plates are snagged; they block each other's progress, and tremendous...