Word: relic
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Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flies around the world to war zones and allies, to China and Russia and Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It's an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me that on occasion, the fuel nozzle from the floating tankers has smashed through the pilots' windshield like an angry space creature...
...ball of fire nearly 10 years ago, less than two miles (3 km) from where the mounted jet now stands. It was an event that doomed the world's fastest-ever passenger jet - an aircraft designed by French and British engineers - to a future as a museum relic...
...Oleanna seemed to grow out of the authentic passions of a particular time (just after the Clarence Thomas hearings), when sexual harassment and political correctness were ripe issues. Race, by contrast, seems like a relic of another era. The advent of Barack Obama may not have invalidated Mamet's cynical view of race relations, but it has made it seem shockingly glib and opportunistic. "This isn't about sex. It's about race," goes the exchange that brings down the curtain in one scene. "What's the difference?" Make sense of that line, and you just might be able...
...some ways, Cockrel is a relic of Detroit's past. She is the only white member of the city council and, when her term ends in late December, she could well be its last. Even though she is personally popular, she is leaving the council partly because she is tired of the scandals that have rocked the city lately. Her departure is a significant moment in the history of Detroit, the largest majority-black city in America. In the 1950s, when Detroit's population reached its 2 million peak, nearly 1.6 million white people lived here. In 1990, though whites...
...attraction as a pillar of the global monetary system is that it isn't beholden to national politics. The downside is that its supply increases fitfully, with no regard for the state of the world economy. That's why John Maynard Keynes called the gold standard a "barbarous relic," and why you won't find anyone outside the goldbug fringe calling for a full return to the gold standard now. But a partial return, in which central banks hold gold as a hedge against financial turmoil (the Reserve Bank of India just bought $6.7 billion of the stuff from...