Word: slowness
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...worse, especially for the poor. Global warming is very scary because once it truly gets started, we may in the end be helpless to stop it. But fear has never been a very good motivator, especially not for the decades-long societal changes we'll need to make to slow climate change. Instead of the apocalypse, what we need is positivity. A low-carbon world will bring benefits that go well beyond simple survival, and that's a message that needs to be heard. But if it really is that bad and the end of the world is nigh - well...
...most revered down some blind alleys. In South Africa, for example, President Nelson Mandela once allowed memories of imperialism to color his views on his country's rampant violent crime, the "encouragement and commission" of which he blamed on white supremacists. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's impatience with the slow pace of land redistribution led him to endorse the violent seizure of white farms, which quickly caused the collapse of the agriculture-based economy...
...convulsing lecturer that grew out of that first small triumph, Twain would become, as Powers puts it, "the nation's first rock star." We know his voice only from written descriptions of it. It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort of funny...
...your grandmother, might have appeared, smiling, in a photograph of a lynch mob. And just as you're about to block out that queasiness, Twain slams in a snippet of what a particularly despicable lynching (in Texas, as it happened) was like. Oh, God. (The man was slow-roasted to death over a coal-oil fire.) And then, when he starts taking off on the missionaries? I don't know that I want to express this opinion. But there's no getting around it: it's funny...
...notes Carlo Altomonte, a professor of international economic policy at Milan's Bocconi University. "One of the main reasons of the trading success in Eastern Europe is that they integrated among themselves," he says. "If you invest in Tunisia, you get stuck in Tunisia. The North Africans are painfully slow to trust each other...