Word: thrall
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule...
...Grimm Brothers, Will (Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger), have built a nice reputation as the ghostbusters of rural Germany circa 1812. Visiting a town that thinks itself in the thrall of some evil creature, the Grimms exorcise the demon, take the money and run. Their supernal powers are all trickery, of course--trapdoors and specters on a stick--but it's a good show. Then they come to a village where the mysteries can't be so easily explained away. Little girls vanish in the forest; trees tiptoe like goblins; a horse devours a child; a wolf...
...aides fidgeted outside, Reagan and Gorbachev were educating each other on their divergent world views. Gorbachev charged that America was run by a military-industrial complex that tries to fatten defense spending by inducing U.S. paranoia about the Soviet Union. He told Reagan that the President was in the thrall of a cabal of archconservatives. He claimed that American think tanks, citing the Heritage Foundation in Washington and the Hoover Institution in California, were feeding Reagan plans "designed to break down the Soviet economy." Reagan replied with astonishment to Gorbachev's conspiracy theories. Indeed, he said, he had always operated...
...masculine misdeeds. And, as in other Mo Yan novels, peasants suffer and bleed while Communist functionaries strut, blunder and suck the country dry as Jintong's mother's breasts. The lad survives, though not without 15 years in prison, three in a mental institution and nearly a lifetime in thrall to his mammary fixation. "Whenever I saw a beautiful breast, my mouth would fill with saliva," he confesses. That weakness brings him a mountain of trouble, and every time fortune smiles?as when a cousin sets him up as chairman of a retail brassiere chain in the 1980s?indecisiveness betrays...
...copal, the "shriveled scorpions and fried grasshoppers" the Zapotec women lay out on the sidewalks, the trucks "rattling over cobbles the shape and size of human skulls." The skeletons that dance behind even a hotel reception desk remind us that the past here has the present in its thrall...