Word: effecting
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...anything to do with the river discovered long ago that it was too powerful to leave alone, this huge continental drainpipe, and so the great engineers engineered the levees and locks and dams that reduced the number of ships that sank and towns that vanished--but also had the effect of hiding the river behind its walls and leaving the rest to the imagination...
...Orleans, the river bed is 170 ft. below sea level--which means the water down there has no reason to go anywhere. But the water on top does, which creates a tumbling, cascading effect that is hell on levees, and yet another in the laundry list of reasons New Orleans is slouching toward Venice, and the environmentalists and engineers are trying to figure out how to keep the city from submerging, if the termites don't finish it off first...
...assessments have risen accordingly--longtime residents have every incentive to sell and leave. Meanwhile, temples like Nauvoo's serve as magnets for Mormon retirees, who take up spiritual tasks such as baptizing deceased ancestors of believers. It will take just 900 such immigrants to effect a Mormon majority in the town. Says Langford, the publisher, grimly: "They want to take back Nauvoo, and since they can't do it with guns, they are doing it with money." If so, in the first of what would no doubt be many social changes, Nauvoo would probably go dry. E-mails Sonja Bush...
What is threatening New Orleans is a combination of two man-made problems: more levees and fewer wetlands. The levees installed along the Mississippi to protect the city from water surges have had a perverse effect: they have actually made it more vulnerable to flooding. That's because New Orleans has been kept in place by the precarious balance of two opposing forces. Because the city is constructed on 100 feet of soft silt, sand and clay, it naturally "subsides," or sinks, several feet a century. Historically, that subsidence has been counteracted by sedimentation: new silt, sand and clay that...
...recent Supreme Court ruling against a Texas high school's prayers before football games, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "[P]regame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship." The public-school district had argued that attendance at football games was voluntary and "decidedly extracurricular." Because I played high school football in Texas in the 1980s, one aspect of Justice Stevens' majority response to this distinction struck home to me. By pointing out that "team members themselves" have to be there, he defended those of us who were simply feverish...