Word: tracts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...skewed science and misplaced mystical zeal. Geneticist Norton Zinder of New York City's Rockefeller University calls him a "fool" and a "demagogue." In a scathing 1984 review of Algeny, one of Rifkin's nine books, Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould wrote that it was "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship . . . I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work...
...Johns Hopkins have made a pill slightly larger than a daily vitamin supplement that has a silicon thermometer and the electronics necessary to broadcast instant temperature readings to a recording device. By having a patient swallow the pill, doctors can pinpoint worrisome hot spots anywhere within the digestive tract. Future "smart pills" may transmit information about heart rates, stomach acidity or neural functions. Says Russell Eberhart, program manager at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory: "This could change the way we diagnose and monitor patients...
...Postmodern Age" has always been an empty description, and "Postindustrial Age" was a phrase about as interesting as a suburban tract. They are not metaphors anyway, but little black flags of aftermath. An age that is "post"-anything is, by definition, confused and dangerously overextended, like Wile E. Coyote after he has left the cartoon plane of solid rock and freezes in thin air, then tries to tiptoe back along a line of space before gravity notices and takes him down to a little poof! in the canyon far below...
...prayers, expresses a yearning that makes Jerusalem's Temple Mount potentially the most volatile 35 acres on earth. Though 19 centuries have passed since Roman troops obliterated Herod's gilded Temple, the Mount remains the object of intense Jewish reverence. But for the past 13 centuries the same trapezoidal tract has also been Islam's holiest site after Mecca and Medina: its Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock honor the spot whence the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to the seventh heaven. Christians too hold in awe this place where Jesus walked. Now a controversy...
...published last May, was that its author was the official Communist Youth League committee in Mao Zedong's home province of Hunan, and that copies were circulating more than three months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Youth League officials in Beijing claimed not to know anything about the tract's origins, but they said the case was "under investigation." Said a Western diplomat: "The language is strongly reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution." If the booklet is genuine, he added, "it tends to confirm the view that a lot of attacks that appear to be aimed at ((ousted Communist Party...