Word: plasticism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Across town, a handful of eager voters at another polling station were met by frustrating delays as election workers struggled to set up. Materials had arrived late, and an hour after the polls were supposed to open, volunteers were still struggling to fasten shut the white plastic ballot boxes. Zahir, a 29-year-old employee at the Ministry of Finance, fumes as he stands in line. "Today everyone in Afghanistan wants to select their favorite candidates, but unfortunately they are not optimistic," he says. "Look at this place: it's chaos. Yet we are in central Kabul - what hope...
...when the imitator was a member of another species (Homo sapiens). The authors of the paper, Annika Paukner of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Animal Center and her colleague Pier Ferrari as well as two Italian researchers, structured the study this way: two experimenters, each holding a small plastic ball, faced each monkey in its cage (10 monkeys in all participated). The monkey was given an identical ball. One of the experimenters imitated whatever the monkey did with the ball - poking it, mouthing it, pounding it. The other experimenter didn't imitate the animal. (See pictures of monkeys...
...need to stop pretending we are honest and instead be honest about cheating. The ethical battle of our time is about the fairness of medical technology: genetic engineering, cloning, steroids, plastic surgery. We are O.K. with Viagra, LASIK and Paxil because they restore basic human functions, but we get really uncomfortable when people improve themselves by buying their pert breasts or giant pecs. It's no different from the original objections to wearing makeup, dyeing one's hair, and oiling up before an ancient Greek wrestling match - which would not have been necessary if ancient Greek men had had makeup...
...weeks ago, I found myself outside the New York University dorm I was living in, sitting on a plastic crate and talking late into the night with two affable fruit vendors, Yasin and Royal, as they sipped Dunkin' Donuts coffee. They often work for 15-hours shifts that last until 7 a.m., six days a week, for about $100 a day. Though they earn low wages, Royal attends college in Azerbaijan, and Yasin is a student at one of Turkey's best universities. They came to New York this summer on short-term visas, hoping to improve their English...
With more than a dozen fan groups on Facebook and a forthcoming iPhone app, Bananagrams may be the most popular game you've never heard of. From a first order two years ago of 5,000 banana-shaped pouches filled with plastic letter tiles, the game has proved to be a word-of-mouth hit, with 2 million units expected to be sold this year...