Word: skies
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year A.D. 2000 has long hovered in an imagined sky like a distant, luminous sign. Generations have used it as a target for their dreams, hopes and fears. Since prophecies usually tell us more about the past than the future, how the millennium was envisioned--and, in a sense, invented--during earlier eras says a great deal about the successive stages of Western history, about the religious as well as secular faith of our ancestors--in short, about how we came to be what...
...plague), he managed to believe both in scientific Copernican astronomy and in astrology. Eventually he turned to the occult. In seven volumes he foretold "the future events of the entire world" (according to his epitaph). In one of his obscure quatrains, he prophesied that in 1999, "from the sky there will come a great King of terror." Nobody knows what that was supposed to mean, but in recent decades many would-be prophets have used those lines to predict all manner of cataclysms, from nuclear war to global warming to the end of the world. This suggests that centuries...
...science, he spent much time working in machine shops and patented a number of inventions, including marine turbines. His book is filled with some of his imagined inventions. Steam boilers are powered by the sun; electricity, which runs everything, is generated by tides; battery-powered airplanes traverse the sky...
...past, the public has rewarded stations for pursuing just this kind of story, though typically less bloody ones. "Usually the ratings shoot sky-high, and the viewers use their remote controls and zap from station to station. They watch them," says Perret. Explains Manhattan psychologist Steven Fishman: "A lot of people have pent-up emotions, so it's cathartic for them to observe such violent action." But, says Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Harvard: "That just shows that the lines between news and entertainment have become very blurred." Former TV news producer Derwin Johnson, a professor at the Columbia Graduate...
...next night the sky had cleared somewhatfor the Eliot formal, but that didn't stop a firealarm from going off a few minutes after the musicstopped. The entire House, including nonfete-goers, ended up herded into the House's tinyfront courtyard...