Word: age
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rowling insists that she never consciously set out to write for children, but that working on Harry Potter taught her how easily she could tap into her childhood memories. "I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old [Harry's age when the series opens]. You're very powerless, and kids have this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable." That's a good description of the social setup she portrays at Hogwarts, where the students have stretches of time with little or no adult supervision. Rowling believes young people...
...brainy nature boy has stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness. Reduced to simple headlines, Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letter- man. "The ironic individual," he writes, "is a bit like Seinfeld without a script; at ease in banter, versed in allusion, and almost debilitatingly self-aware." In Purdy's opinion, the price of such crippling cleverness is social stagnation and private emptiness. Ironists waste time smirking rather than working...
...walking advertisement for home schooling, Purdy received no formal education until the age of 13, when a casual meeting with an admissions officer landed him a coveted place at New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy. Before this--except for "an hour or two a week" of what Purdy archaically calls "arithmetic"--his lessons came from random, heavy reading. He devoured everything from Hardy Boys mysteries to chunky tomes on European history. "We made pretty serious raids on thrift-store book supplies," he says. After a brief, unfulfilling interlude in the local public school, Purdy headed up to Exeter, where...
...years old, play golf three times a week, spend two to three hours a day on my computer and enjoy my new, medium-format camera. I'm a legislative representative for my union. My wife also leads a very active social life. So take heart, seniors. Old age doesn't have to be a rest home or doom and gloom. HAL MCCLINTOCK Pasadena, Calif...
Shingles (a.k.a. herpes zoster) is a common ailment. Over the course of a lifetime, 2 out of every 10 people who have had chicken pox will experience its misery. But while the disease can strike at any time, the risk increases sharply after age 50. Why? Probably because older people have fewer antibodies against varicella-zoster circulating in their bloodstream. Also at high risk are those whose immune systems are compromised, such as AIDS and transplant patients...