Word: stills
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Still, fielding darts from captious intellectuals was not quite the equivalent of facing bullets or a mugger's knife. Why then, ponders Podhoretz, did so many liberals let themselves be intimidated? He devotes much of his book to searching for an explanation and concludes that intellectuals suffered a failure of nerve. When confronted, they would not fight for their beliefs, especially if the opposition came from the left, which was supposed to be on the side of justice and humanity. They would not defend the integrity of thought against crude up-against-the-wall sloganeering...
...world is becoming woefully littered with numbers that defy useful comprehension. Biology, for example, estimates that the human brain contains some 1 trillion cells. But can any imagination get a practical hold on such a quantity? It is easy to picture the symbolic numerals: 1,000,000,000,000. Still, who can comprehend that many individual units of anything at one time? The number teases, dazzles the mind and even dizzies it, but that does not add up to understanding. Biology ought to find out what happens to the brain when it tries to visualize 1 trillion...
...bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times in a year, the fact that a billion minutes ago (A.D. 77) the Christian era had scarcely got under way. Still, such efforts to evoke the actuality of a billion are far likelier to give the curious a picture of an extremely tall stack of currency than of the quantity of a billion units. In truth, most mega-numbers (and micro-numbers) that fly by these days paralyze the mind almost...
...human craving for numbers tells a good deal about man kind. It is both sign and cause of man's long trek from the days of one, two, three, many. It can be taken as a symptom of exuberant joy in the quantity and multiplicity of things. Still, the dizzy acceptance of those truly incomprehensible figures might also be construed as a vicarious variation of the old Faustian game: the yearning to know the unknowable...
...there was still New York to face...