Word: plasticity
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...Becker describes his encounters with people fleeing Kim's totalitarian rule. In northern China, Becker joined a Chinese shopkeeper to hunt for refugees, for whom the Chinese government was paying 60? bounties. They found one near a garbage dump. "As the shopkeeper fished around in his pocket for some plastic twine, a dirt-covered face scabrous with pellagra that looked about fifty years old shrunk back into the shadows of a hood made from grey sackcloth, like a medieval leper," he writes. The woman, who was in fact only 28, had crossed the border in a final effort to avoid...
Vanessa's arms no longer show the damage she once did to them. That's saying something, given that the damage was considerable. The college freshman, 19, started with just a few scratches from a sharp piece of plastic. Later came the razor blades and then the kitchen knives. After a time, she took to wearing bracelets to cover her injuries; when that wasn't enough, she began cutting less conspicuous parts of her body. "I was very creative," she says, with a smile...
...people in the cars around me and wonder how many of them will end up on the beds of my hospital. I suppose one day I could be lying on one of them," he says, casting a glance at the ER's 12 iron-frame beds, covered in green plastic sheets that bear the bloodstains of countless patients who have gone before. "But I try not to think about that...
...more immediate danger was the threat of secondary infections. The ER was the filthiest I have ever encountered. The floor was littered with medical debris--old bloodstained bandages, syringes, broken vials. The garbage bins had no plastic liners and were spattered with coagulated blood, gobs of spit and other fluids. Sweepers came through every hour with dirty mops and pails of brown disinfectant, but their halfhearted labor was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of patients and visitors. Nobody paid any attention to the NO SMOKING sign, not even the doctors and nurses. Broken windows allowed dust to enter...
Matie E. Fricker—a representative from the “sexuality boutique” Grand Opening—arrived with two plastic tub-fulls of sex toys, books, and safer sex supplies...