Word: offing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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But just so you know that human nature has not entirely altered as of this writing: what America once feared as the Soviet Union, we now fear as the Russian non-union--seething duchies with warheads underground. China, with its split personality, continues to make us nervous; we court its...
Our more mysterious problems are, as usual, internal. Mergers aside, we are in an increasing mode of separation from one another. The American class system (always vehemently denied) has never been more stratified. People who make the same money live in the same neighborhoods; they socialize with the same people...
The emerging technologies that purport to bind people together have also created a new information class imposed on the others. Not everyone has a computer, so there is that class of outsiders. Even among the insiders, people seek virtual localities where they find their own kind--chess players chat with...
At the same time, individual privacy is both systemically invaded and willingly forfeited. Businesses spend fortunes spying on the competition. A few weeks ago, a Russian spy was caught listening to a bug planted in the State Department, having possibly made a comfortable shift from cold war espionage to industrial...
I wonder if we really want to have as much to do with one another as we have always claimed to want. Connectedness--that was supposed to be the desperate cry of a world frightened by modernity. "Only connect," pleaded E.M. Forster at the outset of the century. Inventions were...