Word: spiriting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...still need experts. But we can no longer abdicate judgment to them or to the system they've cobbled together. This country, after all, was created by passionately engaged amateurs. The American spirit really is the amateur spirit. The great mass of European settlers were amateur explorers, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who created the U.S. were amateur politicians. "I see democracy," the late historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, as "government by amateurs, as a way of confessing the limits of our knowledge." In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville approvingly noted the absence of "public careers" in America...
Amateurs do the things they want to do in the ways they want to do them. They don't worry too much about breaking rules and aren't paralyzed by a fear of imperfection or even failure. Active citizenship is all about tapping into one's amateur spirit. "But hold on," you say. "I will never understand credit-default swaps or know how to determine the correct leverage ratio for banks." Me neither, and I don't want to depend on an amateur physician telling me how to manage my health. But we can trust our reality-based hunches about...
...ironies of progress can hardly be lost on you. When I came to Harvard in 1993, you had just published in the New York Times an op-ed urging black intellectuals to face up to their own racist attitudes. Invoking the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., you wrote, "While anti-Semitism is generally on the wane in this country, it has been on the rise among black Americans. A recent survey finds not only that blacks are twice as likely as whites to hold anti-Semitic views but—significantly—that it is among younger...
This let's-go-get-loaded spirit might not seem so strange in countries that have long battled excessive youth drinking and alcoholism. But Italy has always prided itself on a balanced - even divine - rapport with the strong stuff. Call it a sipping culture rather than a drinking culture: Italians traditionally serve wine at the family dinner table, with boys and girls often getting their first taste of alcohol around age 12. The national minimum drinking age of 16 is often ignored and rarely enforced. (Read "Should the Drinking Age Be Lowered...
...coincidence that Mousavi's backers are on Tehran's rooftops shouting "God is great," evoking the spirit of the 1979 revolution when Iranians spontaneously poured into the streets, the army laid down its weapons and the Shah had no choice but to flee. It's impossible to tell whether Iran has reached this point again. But even if it hasn't, the open war between the house of Khomeini and the house of Khamenei will forever change Iran...