Word: spreading
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Together these triumphs of science and technology advanced the cause of freedom, in some ways more than any statesman or soldier did. In 1989 workers in Warsaw used faxes to spread the word of Solidarity, and schoolkids in Prague slipped into tourist hotels to watch CNN reports on the upheavals in Berlin. A decade later, dissidents in China set up e-mail chains, and Web-surfing students evaded clueless censors to break the government's monopoly on information. Just as the flow of ideas wrought by Gutenberg led to the rise of individual rights, so too did the unfetterable flow...
After his first address on the banking crisis, in which he explained to families why it was safer to return their money to the banks rather than keep it hidden at home, large deposits began flowing back into the banking system. When he asked everyone to spread a map before them in preparation for a fireside chat on the war in the Pacific, map stores sold more maps in a span of days than they had in an entire year. When he announced a rubber shortage that Americans could help fill, millions of householders, delighted at the call for service...
...They estimate fewer than 10 percent of all Y2K-related failures will occur during the first two weeks of January, with 55 percent of them spread throughout the whole coming year...
...also led to a vicious cycle. Once factory owners realized that time was money--a notion that led to the first so-called efficiency experts in the 1920s--the idea of making every second count began to spread through society. Result: efficiency became an American virtue. Today every conceivable business is open around the clock; we multitask frantically, applying makeup or talking on the phone while driving; we cram our kids' lives with team sports and lessons. Children don't play anymore: they schedule play dates. "We are," says author Gleick, "driven by time...
First question: who is Tom Ripley? He is the lead character in five novels by Patricia Highsmith and now, as incarnated by Matt Damon, a beguiling movie icon in the making. Second question: Who cares? For a start, an international coterie of readers spread across four decades. To that devoted coterie, add Anthony Minghella. "Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in postwar fiction," Minghella says, and he ought to know. The writer-director has spent three years, ever since he finished his Oscar-winning epic The English Patient, puzzling out the emotional vectors of crime fiction's most...