Word: townes
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Solzhenitsyn was born in a resort town in the Caucasus mountains in 1918, the same year the last czar of Russia was murdered by the Bolsheviks. He never knew his father, an artillery officer who died in a hunting accident while his mother was pregnant. His mother was a typist. A zealous communist, Solzhenitsyn served with distinction in World War II, but in 1945, in the teeth of the Red Army's march on Berlin, he was arrested for a personal letter that contained passages critical of Stalin and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. His life...
...that the sun never really sets in the summer, as I discover during a somewhat sleepless night. And the climate here is anything but Arctic. In the heat of the sun, temperatures exceed 70?F, and I shed layers of fleece as I take a jet-lagged walk around town. Not that there's anything to see: Kangerlussuaq didn't really exist until the Americans began using it as an air base in World War II, and though it reverted to Greenland control in 1992, it still feels like an abandoned military camp...
...into Baffin Bay. After getting properly outfitted for our trip to NEEM the next day - our weather forecast is in the teens, but temperatures really can be polar even during the summer - we take a car trip out to the vanishing edge of the glacier, some 30 km outside town. It's the waning hours of the afternoon, though it's hard to tell; time loses its meaning during an Arctic summer. As we drive down Kangerlussuaq's only road, we pass sprawling glacial-melt lakes of the purest blue, framed by rocky hills dusted with brush. The landscape seems...
...cartographer Chu Ssu-pen in 1320. Sung dynasty porcelain (960-1279 AD) has been found at archaeological digs in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Chinese admiral Zheng He explored Africa's east coast between 1405-1433. Most compelling of all, until a few years ago, there lived, north of Cape Town, tribes with light colored skin, Mongolian features and a language tonally similar to Mandarin, who traced their origins to 13th century Chinese sailors and call themselves Awatwa or "abandoned people." Given the fact that not only the white population, but also the black African population migrated to what...
Could this mark the beginning of the end of beer pong? The game does have plenty more critics outside the walls of academia. The town of Belmar, N.J., for example, outlawed outdoor beer pong in 2005 after the city council passed an ordinance declaring that it exposed unconsenting neighbors to "foul language, rowdy and disorderly behavior and to examples of the consumption of alcohol under circumstances that are detrimental." Two other Jersey shore towns Manasquan and Sea Girt have followed suit, and state officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia have made bars put away their pong tables...