Word: sprang
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...area resembles not so much a city as a computer motherboard or a printed circuit. As Thomas Pynchon describes it through the eyes of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate...
Plainness ran deeper than taste. It sometimes grew out of religious conviction--formal severity was built into the Puritan creed, for instance. But it also sprang from the social necessities of American life: the need to make and mend things for oneself, to fit and adapt to local materials. And it acquired a political dimension as metaphor...
...serving youth. The Orthodox have always had an extensive system of Yeshiva day schools; Reform and Conservative are expanding their smaller networks. Sprinkled around the country are high schools sponsored by members of all three branches. It is intriguing to imagine what would happen if more sprang up: instead of saddening her parents by arriving at Seder with a nice Catholic boy (like her older sister's husband), a Reform Jewish girl could thrill them with the fine Conservative lad she met in, say, biology lab. Three guesses as to the faith of their kids...
Given all that, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that this phenomenon sprang from the imagination of a single man (even Walt Disney needed help from the Brothers Grimm). Lucas' offices, as well as many of his filmmaking facilities, are located on Skywalker Ranch, 3,000 mostly pristine acres in the farther reaches of Marin County, 425 miles north of Hollywood. Given the comparative remoteness and Lucas' image in the press as an elusive personality, not to mention the reverential way in which his colleagues and employees often speak about him (one hears a lot of talk...
...Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall is a lack of philosophical humility...