Word: preciously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last half of his life, Albert Einstein was preoccupied with a lonely quest. He wanted to bring together under a single set of equations all of nature's basic forces. The master of relativity never achieved his grand unification, and many colleagues scorned him for wasting his precious time on such a farfetched intellectual exercise. Last week, at a major meeting of physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., outside Chicago, Einstein's seemingly futile dream suddenly sounded far more realistic...
...piled up in so-called Eurodollar accounts in banks overseas, and the threat is ever present that holders might stampede to sell their dollars. Since 1971, minipanics have led to the collapse of worldwide fixed exchange rates against the dollar, the slide of the dollar against gold and other precious metals, and the progressive disintegration of global confidence in the dollar itself...
...American and strikingly at odds with all the recent rhetoric about national sacrifice in a period of menacing energy shortages. Other modern industrial nations such as Japan, Germany and France have managed all along to thrive with mere fractions of the man-made coolness used in the U.S., and precious little of that in private dwellings. Here, so profligate has its use become that the air conditioner is almost as glaring a symptom as the automobile of the national tendency to overindulge in every technical possibility, to use every convenience to such excess that the country looks downright coddled...
...read OPEC'S price lists and had premonitions of its own decline. Jimmy Carter conceded that a recession was settling in; more apocalyptic imaginations foretold worldwide depression. In the U.S., motorists formed predawn gas lines, like clients at methadone clinics, to await the fuel that had so abruptly become precious. Americans could idle there and wonder if their houses would freeze in the winter, when the last heating oil guttered out of their tanks. Raised on a gospel of infinite resources, they bitterly blamed conspiracies: Arabs, oil companies, middlemen. They also gave Jimmy Carter the second lowest rating of presidential...
...houses next door, thus giving him time to escape. His Aunt Liberty avenges her husband and brother to prevent her 16 year old son from doing so, and so dies in his place. His uncle too, is willing to share food, that most precious of commodities, with a dying girl, so weak that poppies bruise her skin...