Word: hellishness
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...conditioned to commit such irrational acts (see box). Yet the stories told by those who survived were both fearsomely fascinating and ultimately inexplicable. How could such idealistic, if naive, people set out to build an idyllic haven from modern society's many pressures and turn it into a hellish colony of death? This is how the Jonestown dream turned into a nightmare...
...experiences of a would-be American dope smuggler in the hellish prisons of a Middle Eastern country and his eventual escape make up the plot of Alan Parker's shattering new film, Midnight Express, but to so limit the description of the movie is something akin to samming up Citizen Kane as the filmic biography of a newspaper magnate. Like all extraordinary movies based on real people or actual events, Midnight Express has boldly transcended the limits of its true-life story to bring forth a larger-than-life refinement. The five-year incarceration of Billy Hayes becomes an inspiring...
...hellish orange flames and oily black smoke that rose quickly into San Diego's sunny but smoggy skies one morning last week signaled the worst air tragedy in U.S. aviation history. At least 150 people died, the first fatalities on PSA's record. They included all 135 aboard the PSA airliner, the two occupants of a tiny 2,100-lb. Cessna 172 that had collided with it, and at least 13 residents struck by aircraft debris or engulfed by the flames that destroyed ten houses...
...black-hole fever. The parcels of nothingness are a favorite topic on the lecture circuit. They bring out record crowds for planetarium shows, and they have lately been the theme of a spate of books. In the popular lexicon, the term black hole once suggested only the legendary hellish cell in Calcutta in which British prisoners were held by an 18th century Indian nawab. Now it has become an immediately recognizable catchword for a different kind of darkness. Says one young astrophysicist...
...what has this technology accomplished? In Barrett's dour view, it has enslaved us. William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution have brought forth even more hellish inventions to refuel the Western world's "frantic dynamism." Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, B.F. Skinner's proposals for a "technology of behavior" and the threat of nuclear holocaust complete a disastrous legacy...