Word: wonderments
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...hundred twenty years later, lawmakers are so unpopular, it's a wonder people fight over the means of getting more of them - except that nowadays about $400 billion per year in federal aid follows the Census numbers, for everything from jobs to bridges to schools, so this really matters. (Watch an interview with Census Director Robert Groves...
...soap operas and Dora the Explorer. The ads are meant to boost the response rate, since any household that doesn't mail back its form gets visited by a Census worker, another pricey line item. In all, it will work out to about $49 per person, which makes you wonder whether the government should have just sent an e-mail instead of a packet that looks like junk mail. (How about spending a little more money on design?) But the Census officials worried about privacy, so the increasingly irrelevant post office, whose volume dropped 13% last year, gets a spring...
...Artificial photosynthesis is a real idea, although it's further from deployment than the novel suggests. McEwan's background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating...
Especially not now. In fact, thanks to the ongoing scandal, more than a few friends and colleagues wonder why I haven't given up on Catholicism. I'll still be attending Easter Mass this weekend precisely because I follow Catholicism and not the Catholic Church - because Easter's redemptive message resides not in my church but in my religion. Not even our bishops, try as they have, can shame us away from the Eucharist and the human elevation we derive from it. Our church's disrepute, in fact, compels us to consider our religion's virtues more seriously. For starters...
...born in Belgium to Turkish Muslim parents and is now the Secretary for Public Sanitation and Monument Conservation in the Brussels region. "I don't like the burqa. Every person should be visible. In most cases, it is not a religious act, but macho one," he says. "But I wonder if we need a law on it. If we do this, we could make it a symbol and reinforce extremists on all sides. And in the middle of this economic crisis, where everyone is concerned about their job, this is not the number one problem...