Word: rackets
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...scientists could eavesdrop on the brain of a human embryo 10, maybe 12 weeks after conception, they would hear an astonishing racket. Inside the womb, long before light first strikes the retina of the eye or the earliest dreamy images flicker through the cortex, nerve cells in the developing brain crackle with purposeful activity. Like teenagers with telephones, cells in one neighborhood of the brain are calling friends in another, and these cells are calling their friends, and they keep calling one another over and over again, "almost," says neurobiologist Carla Shatz of the University of California, Berkeley...
...compare squash and racquetball, I would use the analogy of chess and checkers. Squash has a different ball, a different racket, different rules and a different court, but you're still in a big box, and that's like having the same checkered board," Barenbaum explains...
...wonder you never get your homework done, with that awful racket going on day and night. Turn it down this instant...
Nowadays, alas, the espionage racket lacks class. Ambition is driven by hubris and shabby moneygrubbing. Pollard gets a job with Naval Intelligence and sells out to the Israelis. Ames succeeds thanks to the "incredible malfeasance" of colleagues who do not think it suspicious that he banks more than $1 million and drives a $40,000 Jaguar on a $69,000 salary. Nicholson, charged with, among other things, selling the Russians the names of CIA people he trained, flunks his own course in dry cleaning: he never suspects that for months he has been taped, wiretapped and photographed by counterintelligence agents...
...early-morning (and afternoon and evening) air with cries of "Good morning!" or "Good evening!" or "Thank you very much! Please! Thank you very much!" These greetings were punctuated by constant repetition of a candidate's name and produced not the sound of democracy but an unbearable cacophony. Such racket is the implacable enemy of the reflection that democracy should encourage. I fear that despite the political correctness in some of its outward forms, Japan remains at heart and in spirit a profoundly undemocratic country. MICHAEL HOFFMAN Hokkaido, Japan...