Word: rankness
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...glutted Indians to read something mind broadening. The next announcement by Amitav Ghosh that he has a new novel to present to his countrymen?with multitudes of unexpected data tucked inside, ready to overwhelm even the most information-resistant reader with a sense of the magic of facts?will rank as the most important event in India's literary calendar that year...
Every appearance by Chinese leaders is political. They enter rooms in single file according to rank, and newspapers place photos of senior officials higher on the page than those of lesser rivals. So strict are the rules that when Hu Jintao took over as Party chief from Jiang Zemin two years ago, Beijing's print media waited four hours for instructions from propaganda officials on whose picture to run at the top. (They ran side by side.) The two leaders are now thought to be jockeying for power; Jiang remains chairman of the Central Military Commission, and a key Party...
...compact that determines the allocation of water from the Colorado River. Scientists have shown, by studying tree rings and other historical evidence, that the allocation was based on water flows that were the highest they had been for more than 475 years. By contrast, the flows since 1999 rank among the lowest. As a result, Lake Powell, the giant reservoir created on the Colorado by the Glen Canyon Dam, stands some 60% below capacity and seems destined to fall even lower. No wonder that states like Colorado--whose rights to that water are trumped by the rights of California, Nevada...
...mother and stepfather were in vaudeville, and because I was raised in that environment, I knew you didn't complain. You didn't pull rank, and you didn't have tantrums because it didn't get you anywhere. I knew it was a sink-or-swim situation...
...Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. From early adolescence, Crick had no truck with truths arrived at by religious revelation as opposed to observation and experimentation. Upon learning that Cambridge University's science-dominated new college was planning to build a Christian chapel, he resigned from the rank of its Fellows. "Perpetuating mistakes from the past" was not Crick's way to move forward. --By James D. Watson