Word: tragic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Africa to the Americas were essentially unheard of. This travel ease is a new phenomenon, preceded by centuries of a crueler sort of journey. The captivity and forced migration of Africans to the “new world” via European slaving ships is by far the most tragic and important Atlantic crossing in world history. While the slaves transported are beginning to be the subjects of admirable academic inquiry, historical silence in Ghana is indicative of limits of discourse on the subject of Atlantic slavery...
...look to any great tragic operas to draw inspiration...
...belligerent correlative for a universally suppressed anxiety. A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood (actually red sugar water) from a severed cow's head, then are killed by an electric bug zapper - the tragic cycle of life and death played as low farce by the lowest orders. And there's something both hilarious and chilling about his Lullaby series, steel and mirror-glass medicine cabinets in which colorful pills are meticulously organized into glittering reliquaries...
...systematically approached. Fast, a professor of social work at Yeshiva University, examines five case studies from 1974 to 1999--spending most of his time on 1999's Columbine massacre--hoping to figure out what drives young perpetrators to mass murder. Unfortunately, the motives are as varied as they are tragic: while Fast faults easy access to powerful firearms as a constant factor, sexual abuse, mental illness, broken homes and social isolation have all played a part in one rampage or another. Fast regards school shootings as "acts of terrorism without an ideological core" and believes that trying to predict them...
...million residents was less a triumph of coordination than a reaction to disaster; nothing says "Get out of Dodge" like the fresh memory of a city under water. It's even more jarring to watch Army Corps of Engineers officials hailing their hurricane defenses just three years after their tragic errors and warped priorities drowned New Orleans. The sad truth is that the Big Easy--while slightly less vulnerable than it was before Katrina--is still extremely vulnerable. And eventually the region will face the Big One, a storm far larger than Gustav or Katrina. "We got lucky this time...