Word: smarted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...live attack coverage found a particularly appreciative audience five time zones away, in Beijing. To the Chinese, the Gulf War was a revelation--an introduction to 21st century tactics and weaponry that pointed out, in the most graphic way possible, the limits of China's massive but antiquated military. Smart bombs, flexible command and control, and seamless, high-tech attacks dazzled the Chinese leadership, who ramped up a campaign to upgrade the People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) to world-class status. The new buzz words in China's Ministry of Defense became "limited war under high-tech conditions"--and China...
Plowing through the New York Times on a recent Sunday, I read in the Metro Section that infertile couples in the market for smart-kid genes regularly place advertisements in the newspapers of their own Ivy League alma maters offering female undergraduates $7,500 for a donated egg. Before I could get that news comfortably digested, I came across an article in the Magazine section describing SAT prep courses for which parents spend thousands in the hope of raising their child's test scores enough to make admission to an Ivy League college possible. So how can people who have...
...cite are based on a thorough grounding in genetics and statistics and advanced microbiology, rest assured that I attended an Ivy League college myself. That was in the days, I'll admit, when any number of people were admitted to such institutions without having shown any evidence of carrying smart-kid genes even in trace elements. Somehow, most of these dimmer bulbs managed to graduate--every class needs a lower third in order to have an upper two-thirds--and somehow most of them are now millionaires on Wall Street...
...many of them had going for them in the admissions process was that they were identified as "legacies"--the offspring of alumni. In Ivy League colleges, alumni children are even now admitted at twice the rate of other applicants. For that reason, egg seekers may not actually need genuine smart-kid genes for their children: after all, an applicant whose mother and father and egg donor were all alumni could be considered a triple legacy...
...grandchildren? As methods are perfected of enhancing a college application through increasingly expensive services--one young man mentioned in the magazine article had $25,000 worth of SAT preparation--it might become more important to have a parent who's a Wall Street millionaire than to have smart-kid genes. Maybe it would be prudent to add a sentence to those ads in college papers: "Preference given to respondents in the lower third of the class...