Word: 21st
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...funk. Some use movie samples as their starting point: "Riding at the Speed of Sound" jazzes up the pathos-imbued vocals of 1960s starlet Carrie Ku Mei with rock riffs and a break-beat exuberance worthy of Basement Jaxx. Others are simply inspired by the movies, like the cheeky "(21st Century) Char Siu Bao," which features present-day siren Gloria Tang singing in Mandarin to the tune of "Mambo Italiano...
Here's a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn't get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn't get an agent. "I did what you're supposed to do," she says. "I queried literary agents. I went to writers' conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it." So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself...
Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades...
...economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising...
Meanwhile, the checkerspot slumbers beneath the snowy alpine meadows of Otero County. Cloudcroft cautiously prepares for what it hopes will be the usual summer tourist invasion. And environmentalists intensify their campaign to add what would be the 21st butterfly to the list of protected species in the U.S. "Diverse native insects should be cause for celebration," says Rosmarino. "I would like to see Cloudcroft honor and promote its endemic checkerspot, perhaps with a butterfly festival." Cloudcroft is less enthusiastic. "Their agenda," warns Michael Nivison, the village administrator, "is to get everybody out of the forest...