Word: topically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decades, the French considered it taboo to question whether immigration and foreign influences were diluting France's social and cultural character. Indeed, the topic was considered so toxic that no one in France besides extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would even take it up in public. But times have changed. Twenty years after Le Pen's National Front Party (FN) became a political force in France, its view that immigration is threatening the French national identity is starting to gain wider acceptance. Now, the government is putting the issue front and center for the first time by encouraging...
...Whether these two areas of research are related was a topic of debate at the annual convention of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) in New Orleans in late October. So too was their clinical significance. No population study has ever conclusively linked anesthetic drugs to Alzheimer's or dementia. (Although doctors have long noted that about 10% of patients who receive anesthetics for major surgery experience a temporary period of "post-operative cognitive decline" after coming out of anesthesia, the condition is not limited to elderly patients, and it could be the result of inflammation or other stress responses...
...discussion—which included professors, police chiefs, and students—provided further insight into the Gates incident and recognized that the topic of race relations in America is still a pressing issue...
Still, Levitt and Dubner do tackle one legitimately controversial topic, one that I think could benefit from a somewhat contrarian perspective: geoengineering, or using technology to directly cool the earth to compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth...
Ultimately, that is the right way to use geoengineering and to approach climate change. While geoengineering shouldn't be ignored, Levitt and Dubner's biggest mistake in their examination of the topic lay in being seduced by a clever-sounding, cheap and contrarian shortcut. Climate change, however, is one issue for which the conventional wisdom still works, even though it's costly - and even though conventional wisdom won't sell 3 million books...