Word: swath
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More Patriots are not the answer. Despite its gee-whiz exploits in the gulf, the Patriot flies at only three times the speed of sound and covers only a narrow swath of real estate. It has no trouble dealing with the unsophisticated Scud, a Mach 4 weapon that has proved to be the Edsel of missiles. An ICBM warhead, on the other hand, enters the atmosphere at 15 times the speed of sound. A Patriot could scarcely get off its launcher before an ICBM did its damage...
...military lexicon needs a new term: "eco-war." What better way to describe the acts of environmental carnage committed last week in the Persian Gulf, where the air is thick with the smoke from burning oil wells and a wide swath of crude petroleum is fouling the water and devastating wildlife? If these disasters brought to mind the Exxon Valdez, the news of air attacks on nuclear- and chemical-weapons facilities raised the specter of Chernobyl and Bhopal. The environment itself has become both a weapon and a victim...
...common. All the brooding talk of recession and employment cutbacks has hit the men's fashion industry where it has hit the economy: right in the middle. The staple of the business -- the standard two- or three-piece suit that fits around the average frame as trimly as a swath of burlap around 50 lbs. of Pillsbury -- has lost its allure: too drab, too ordinary and, in an approaching crunch, too superfluous. What's already in the closet is good enough for now, and if it's not -- if a man has the cash and a need for flash...
Like moths around candles, a number of gifted writers have been dazzled by that subspecies of Homo americanus, the murdering sociopath. Witness Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision. Or this well-crafted account of the fatal swath cut by an Indiana-born dentist named Kenneth Z. Taylor...
...subject, whose every page vibrates with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle and Cindy Sherman to the short- lived graffiti movement) is, on its own, the best summary yet written of American...