Word: tracts
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...Rushdie, speaking through the Moor, is not writing an allegory or a political tract about recent Indian history, although elements of both are undeniably present. And when his narrator gets a bit preachy, he quickly cuts himself off: "Enough, enough: away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger!" The true subject of The Moor's Last Sigh is language in all its uninhibited and unpredictable power to go reality one better and rescue humans from the fate of suffering in silence...
...whole thing, from soup to dessert, was a low-fat meal. That's because Chef Folse had cooked it not with conventional oil but rather with an experimental--and as yet unapproved--synthetic oil called olestra. Olestra is the stealth missile of fat molecules; it passes through the gastrointestinal tract without being digested or absorbed. As far as the human body is concerned, olestra is fat-free...
...rigid enough to burrow through sand, this creature would have had a sturdy, fluid-filled body cavity. It would have had musculature capable of strong contractions. It probably had a heart, a well-defined head with an eye for sensing light and, last but not least, a gastrointestinal tract with an opening at each end. What kind of genetic machinery, Erwin wondered, did nature need in order to patch together such a creature...
...that are based on intuition rather than solid evidence. One favorite is the so-called empty barrel, or open spaces, hypothesis, which compares the Cambrian organisms to homesteaders on the prairies. The biosphere in which the Cambrian explosion occurred, in other words, was like the American West, a huge tract of vacant property that suddenly opened up for settlement. After the initial land rush subsided, it became more and more difficult for naive newcomers to establish footholds...
...agreed that the present paved tract needs to be beautified...