Word: polarizer
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Speer evokes one memorable night at Obersalzberg. It was Aug. 23, 1939. Hitler had just received a telegram from Stalin agreeing to the nonaggression pact that set the stage for the invasion of Poland nine days later. An unusual polar light flooded the sky and, Speer writes, "the final act of the Götterdämmerung could not have been staged with greater effect. All our faces and hands cast off an unnatural red glow. Abruptly Hitler turned to one of his military adjutants and said: That looks like much blood. This time it won't come...
From their polar positions, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. see themselves as witty, wily intellectuals magnificently equipped to interpret (respectively) the left and right of U.S. life. Except when they confront each other directly, the notion is not entirely absurd. But when they fence on television or in type, bitchiness erodes their polish and learned discourse dissolves into tantrums...
THERE has not been a topic for such worried conversation since James Baldwin forecast the fire next time. Suburban matrons predict the melting of the polar icecaps followed by catastrophic floods. Busy executives and bearded hippies discuss the presence of DDT in the flesh of Antarctic penguins. All sorts of Americans utter new words like ecosystem and eutrophication. Pollution may soon replace the Viet Nam war as the nation's major issue of protest...
...interior. But, he added, "One cannot restrain the speculation that the gases might be of biological origin." If that is the case, he theorized, they may have been produced by organisms that found shelter in a relatively hospitable ( -94°F.) region near the edge of Mars' southern polar cap, where Mariner 7 concentrated its cameras and instruments. There, he said, they might have drawn water from the polar ice and protection from the sun's ultraviolet radiation under a cloud of carbon-dioxide particles...
Other scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hotly dispute the idea that the polar caps are largely frozen water. Most investigators are now convinced that they are mostly frozen carbon dioxide, otherwise known as dry ice. Mariner 7 helped their argument. Its infra-red radiometer measured the temperature of the area at - 253°F., or roughly the frost point of carbon dioxide on Mars...