Word: sixteenth
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This most recent conflicts in India stems from one small piece of land in Ayodhya. Originally, a Hindu temple to the God Rama was built there, but in the sixteenth century, Muslims tore down the temple and replaced it with a mosque. This mosque was left standing until a decade ago, when Hindus tore down the mosque, leading to riots in which 2,000 people died. The issue comes down to who should have a house of worship on this land...
...about theory. I should write one on patterns in the history of life.” Gould also hopes to tackle the construction of his own profession, having built up an impressive antiquarian book collection on the early history of paleontology, which he calls “a sixteenth- to eighteenth-century phenomenon...
...aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, public attention has turned once again to the cryptic prognosticatory quatrains of the sixteenth-century mystic Nostradamus. An e-mail that landed in many in boxes in the weeks after the attack quotes what it calls a prediction of the French astrologer’s: “In the City of God there will be a great thunder, / Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb, / The third big war will begin when the big city is burning...
...idea that the attacks were predicted is deeply appealing. If they were predicted, if someone foresaw the disaster in the sixteenth century, then the hijackers weren’t truly operating in complete secrecy. The idea of terrorists in our midst, going about their evil under our very noses with no one aware of their sinister intentions, is terrifying: how can you thwart terrorists camouflaged as suburbanites? A foreseen disaster is somehow more manageable...
...quatrain attests, vague warnings are seductive. They create a feeling of our being in control of an otherwise uncontrolled and uncontrollable situation: We feel that we know what’s going to happen. But the future can’t be predicted—not by a sixteenth-century mystic, not by someone writing in the style of a sixteenth-century mystic, and not by the Bush administration. To imagine that it can is to succumb to the worst sort of superstition...