Word: tenners
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...Tenner's gently skeptical fascination with what he calls "the perversity of everyday objects and systems" seems unlikely to overturn the neo-utopianism of the Wired generation, that's all the more reason to attend closely to it. For though his history of technological "revenge effects" ranges freely over the past two centuries, most of his examples take a healthy dose of air out of today's overinflated enthusiasm with high tech...
Contemporary technophiles could learn a lot from the fire ants' story. They could learn even more from historian Edward Tenner's newly published Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Knopf; 346 pages; $26), in which that story and many more like it combine to paint a richly detailed picture of one of the more enduring features of modernity's landscape: the way our best-laid technological plans often go so thoroughly awry...
...looking to Washington for guidance may be disappointed. As the sordid spectacle of the budget battle and the midterm elections showed, there is still no will in the capital to make hard economic decisions. "How do they ever expect our kids to pay that $3.3 trillion debt?" worries Tom Tenner, a retired appliance-company executive in Houston. "No one seems to care or give a damn. They feel we can borrow forever." Still, the capital is not immune to the jitters. Washington caterers say that guest lists are smaller and there are more lunches than dinners, more wine than champagne...
...when his parents sent him here at 14. He loved it, paid his own way with scholarship help for two more years, and today speaks fluent Norwegian as one of the teachers. He is speaking with difficulty just now because a beginning class has covered him with paper tags: TENNER on his teeth, EN MUNN on his mouth, EN NESE on his nose and so on. He is a huge, powerfully built youth, amiably playing the gawk for his adoring students. But he is serious as he tells his plans: St. Olaf College in the fall and eventually teaching English...
...experimental changes in her voice succeed better when they pertain to the meaning of the songs. Her accent helps her role as an Aussic in "The Dreaming" or as a Cockney thug blowing up a bank in "There Goes a Tenner." Her frequent use of electronic voice-altering techniques help set the mood of many of the songs. At the end of "Keep it Open" the words are lost and her voice seems to become another instrument. She seems to sing backwards along a wavering Oriental line...