Culture in a Liquid Modern World, by Zygmunt Bauman (Polity, £12.99) Back in the mutable present, the sociologist Bauman here offers some acerbic interpretations of a long-contested word.
Both of the productions that I saw had more spark than the Met's first new shows this season, and, unlike the Lincoln Center simulcasts, they provided the irreproducible thrill of live action — what Walt Whitman once called the "liquid world" of operatic art.
This is our world, awash with a liquid more overrated than oil.
Since 1984, scientists at the Cyc project (short for encyclopedia) have been spinning a vast database of the sprawling web of everyday knowledge that people use to get by in the world: water is a liquid, liquids can be carried in containers, a cup is a container, for the water to stay in the cup it must be held right side up.
James Lights Out Toneyey was once known as a hard-nosed, rugged, relentless and merciless world champion boxer, a liquid stylist capable of making opponents miss punches by millimeters and then immediately pay for their inadequacies.
The ratio of tomato solids to liquid in World's Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick.
It seems that our alternative to keeping things in reasonable working order on this planet is an extremely dicey future on a brave new world of liquid nitrogen, tar, and smog.
If liquid rich-world bonds are a scarce and precious resource, then the troubles within the euro zone are good news for Japan.
The argument is linked, at the end of the article, with the ascendency of "super-diversity" as a sociological condition in which solidarity and membership has become becomes impossible in a world of "liquid mobility".
