Word: soiling
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Mexico City sits upon a reclaimed lake, and for centuries it has slowly been sinking into the spongy soil. Buildings along the same block often settle at differing speeds, and streets also sink at random. The famed Palacio de Bellas Artes, where American tourists fight for tickets to the Ballet Folklorico, has dropped nine feet since it was completed in 1934. Considering its flimsy underpinnings, Mexico City is a particularly treacherous locale in which to construct a subway...
That shape, and the ingenious engineering that made the project feasible, is the handiwork of Mexico's largest builder, Bernardo Quintana. His box tunnel literally floats like a ship on subsoil that is 80% water. The trick was to remove precisely the right weight of soil and water without undermining buildings alongside the right of way. To do so, Quintana first built sidewalls for a trench, then removed the muck between them through a complex electroosmosis process of his own devising. The roof to form a tunnel came last. By the time the whole subway is completed in November...
...poeticism and evocative drama. The popular portrayal of this period also habitually refers to it as the death-knell of the symphony; in which traditional forms were dealt a stunning blow and collapsed from sheer exhaustion after the breathless and reckless creation of munificent musical cathedrals on the consumptive soil of weary nineteenth-century harmony. The post-romantic decades are viewed as the beginning of a still-unresolved crisis in which succeeding musicians have become crippled with a morbid obsession of emancipation from the past, resulting in the aberrations of serialism and the avant-garde. While it is undeniable that...
Vast Scale. The Kikuyu, according to one participant, strip naked, then hold hands in a circle around a darkened hut and chant an oath before entering it. Inside the hut they eat soil and swear to follow the oath. "The government of Kenya is under Kikuyu leadership, and this must be maintained," goes the pledge. "If any tribe tries to set itself up against the Kikuyu, we must fight them in the same way that we died fighting the British settlers. No uncircumcised leaders [for example, the Luo] will be allowed to compete with the Kikuyu. You shall not vote...
...insight and a polemicist's passion to the dangers of environmental pollution. "The new technological man," says Commoner, "carries strontium 90 in his bones, iodine 131 in his thyroid, DDT in his fat and asbestos in his lungs. There is now simply not enough air, water and soil on earth to absorb man-made poisons without effect. If we continue in our reckless way, this planet before long will become an unsuitable place for human habitation." At Washington University, Commoner now heads the first of a series of environmental health institutes being established at major campuses...