Word: tracts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Centuries later, it was still there, enriching the soil. "You couldn't help but notice it. There would be all this poor, grayish soil, and then, right next to it, a tract of black that was several meters deep," says Johannes Lehmann, a soil scientist who worked in Manaus, Brazil, in the late 1990s. After he left the Amazon in 2000 for a job at Cornell University, N.Y., Lehmann started wondering what would happen if farmers today could make their own terra preta. He has found one answer in a field trial in Kenya, where 45 farmers achieved twice...
...children affected by the Sichuan earthquake, paid for by Versace and operated under the auspices of Li's charity, the One Foundation. The occasion is only theoretically private. Hundreds of people pour in from the road or strain at the wire mesh that separates the school from the tract of temporary housing it adjoins. There is barely room to stage the songs and dances that the children have so assiduously rehearsed. When Li and Versace tour a classroom, they do so while amazed farmers press faces at every window. Those who can't get close shove mobile phones through...
...about a century, scientists have been studying the role bacteria play in the gastrointestinal tract, a complex ecosystem made up of helpful and harmful bugs whose interactions aren't fully understood. The bugs begin to infiltrate when we're born. Some make us sick, while others help the body work better. An average adult gut contains about a kilogram of bacteria - 100 trillion bugs of some 500 different species...
...early on, just like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, he's been making pictures that are brilliantly open to the flotsam of the visible world, the little accidents of vision and oddball details that snapshots automatically gather up. He is fascinated by American junk-space, the banal stretches of tract housing and strip malls. But there's nothing camp or ironic about Eggleston's work. The power of his pictures rests on their casual but absolute sincerity, their conviction that small is beautiful. There's something very American about this, a valorization of the commonplace, carried to a level...
...called, as though he were taking you on a tour, but one prone to dwell on the sketchiest roadside attractions. In a photo by Eggleston there might be a sunbeam that sweetly anoints a full dish rack on a white sink. There might also be a dismal suburban tract house or a bunch of plastic bottles scattered across a dirt road. It was a make-of-it-what-you-will exhibition, and a lot of critics didn't know what to make of it. The Times critic called it "perfectly boring...