Word: thingness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...words: "The frontier America of Lincoln's youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 in Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed. (We are, by turn - and a writer says it with sadness - essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can't play the image game has a hard time playing...
...Darwin's writing: "[T]he most important way in which Darwin altered his era was by getting people who did do science to ask a new kind of question. Some scientific revolutions have surprisingly small ideological aftershocks; Michael Faraday's discovery that electricity and magnetism are the same thing was as large a discovery as any in the history of science, but it had a paltry aftereffect...For a new scientific theory to become a model in its time, vastly influential outside its immediate claims, it has to release thinking people from a bond that they had long recognized...
...Perhaps, then, it's a good thing they have been commemorated in Confessions of a Shopaholic, a movie adaptation of Sophie Kinsella's series of novels about a shopping-obsessed, debt-ridden young English journalist named Becky Bloomwood (Isla Fisher). As a romantic comedy, it is forgettable. But as an ill-timed anthropological artifact, Confessions offers weird pleasures, not least among them the fact that it makes us root for the debt collector. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...thing remains the same. At the end of the night, the Eagles came out on top, and they have their goaltender to thank...
...today's carefully stage-managed Washington, the last thing anyone expects from members of Congress is candor or spontaneity. So perhaps it's not all that surprising that Representative Pete Hoekstra unwittingly triggered a maelstrom of criticism last weekend when he Twittered about his trip to Iraq. "Just landed in Baghdad," the Michigan Republican typed on his BlackBerry, alerting the nearly 3,000 people who have signed up to follow him on the social-networking service of the trip that he and five others, including House minority leader John Boehner, had embarked on. Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House...