Word: stuff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
America in the Brangelina ERA does not lack celebrity advocates: Scarlett Johansson for Barack Obama, George Clooney for Darfur, Matt Damon for clean water. Whether the famous are effective advocates for good is debatable, but Madison Avenue long ago proved they are great advocates for buying stuff. Ironically, considering the tonnage of celeb-inspired purchases choking our landfills, this also makes them ideal pitchmen for the environment. After all, green issues are about consumption: what to eat, how to build your house, what junk to fill it with and how to dispose...
...shame, because it includes the single best one-line defense not just of himself but also of how a democratic society works in the first place. "A discriminating irreverence," he wrote, "is the creator and protector of human liberty." This would be the polite way of saying "Go stuff your...
...thrust was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice--manner of speech, for example--were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery imposed on its victims. At the same time, he was well aware of the possibility that the oppressed might eke out moments of joy amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s. The narrator asks...
...Strong stuff, especially when it's funny. Sometimes unsettling too. But the man who said those things came from America's heart. Mark Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, grew up on the nation's literal main stream, the Mississippi River, in Hannibal, Mo. Having failed to find a ship that would take him to South America and the fortune he proposed to make from coca, by the age of 23 he had become a Mississippi-steamboat pilot. It was a job he held just briefly, but the memory of the river, its enchantments and dangers, found...
...spots around the world, and you could take care of the emissions from all the vehicles on the planet. And what do you do with the carbon you collect? For starters, you could sell captured greenhouse gasses to, well, greenhouses; farmers pay up to $300 per ton for the stuff to help plants grow. If the scrubbers were deployed on a grand scale, though, lakes of liquid CO2 would need to be pumped into deep underground reservoirs. A more exciting--if more remote--possibility is to combine CO2 with hydrogen and convert it back into fuel that cars could burn...