Word: 1950s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...basic rules of chemistry are any guide, life should not exist. Scientists showed in the 1950s that shooting an electric spark through a soup of chemicals -- thus simulating lightning strikes on the primordial planet earth -- could produce simple organic compounds. But complex, self-reproducing chemicals like dna? They shouldn't have arisen in a trillion years. At an even deeper level, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe should inexorably move toward disorganization. Cups of tea always cool off; they never spontaneously get hotter. Iron rusts, but rust never turns into iron...
...1950s it was the beatniks, staging a coffeehouse rebellion against the Leave It to Beaver conformity of the Eisenhower era. In the 1960s the hippies arrived, combining antiwar activism with the energy of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Now a new subculture is bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT (see margin...
...1950s, Tupperware had a novel idea to promote its product. Instead of mailing catalogues to the suburban housewives who bought their plastic storage containers, they decided to send fellow homemakers--called "Tupperware ladies"--to do the peddling...
...Tupperware is 41 years old now, but there are still people who believe that it hasn't changed since the 1950s," she said. "That's simply not the case anymore...
...1950S THE YOUNG RICHARD Rodriguez left Mexico with his parents to settle in California. Now the Mexican border runs through his brain. On one side is an old country more imagined than recalled, an ur-land of fatedness and tragic history. On the other is a bright, forgetful America, where every sunset takes the day with it. For years Rodriguez has been negotiating the divide in a mood of deep melancholy. In 1981 he published Hunger of Memory, an account of his longings en route through the parochial schools of Sacramento and the university campuses of Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley...