Word: soiling
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...flourish in the void.” Millhauser’s accuracy with words paints a picture that strives to come alive.Steeped though he may be in influences ranging from Jorge Luis Borges to Franz Kafka, Millhauser often remains strongly—even disappointingly—anchored in American soil. The second chapter, “Impossible Architectures,” features “The Dome,” an unmistakable dystopian portrayal of today’s consumerist society. In a narrative closely resembling historical essay, the story details the evolution of a large, transparent, protective dome, first...
...Ground Forces Indonesia is both blessed and cursed by geology. Volcanic ash contributes to the archipelago's fecund soil. Yet eruptions periodically kill thousands. Indonesia is also rich in minerals and oil, exporting nearly half a million barrels a day. All told, the country's buried wealth accounts for almost 30% of its total exports. But the same grinding geologic processes that make this wealth possible also bedevil Indonesia with disasters like the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people in Sumatra. Lusi is unlike any previous disaster, however. Unfolding in implacable slow motion...
...site as the Big Hole - a 100-ft. (30 m) plume of white smoke billows into the sky, obscuring the sun and spreading the sulfurous odor of rotting eggs. On a narrow causeway leading to the caldera, dozens of trucks idle in a queue, waiting to deliver soil for the massive earthworks meant to contain the mud. Already, they have transported more than 88 million cu. ft. (2.5 million cu m) of dirt to build eight miles (13 km) of levees around the site. Dozens of cranes work late into the evening piling the dirt atop bulwarks nearly...
...deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel - Monday's money shot for the cameramen among us - so as one they surged forward to surround the two men, leaving the spot where we all had been instructed to wait. We'd been on North Korean soil for all of 20 minutes, and already the handlers were frantic. "Please, we are all your friends here," one beseeched the mob, "but you must move back behind the yellow line." Ignored and increasingly flustered, the poor guy then blurted out one of the other foreign words he knew...
...some vehicular traffic. It's possible to walk out the front door, see people and try to talk to them. Not from our hotel. It's isolated and difficult to walk to or from. And that was the point. There hadn't been this many Americans on North Korean soil since the Korean War, and our hosts plainly didn't want us mingling. When I later groused about it to a colleague posted to Pyongyang for the Russian wire service Itar-Tass, he chuckled: "Do you know what foreigners here call your hotel? Alcatraz. It's difficult to get into...