Word: algerism
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...conference, fate brought her into the line of sight of her Governor, who allegedly divined beneath her frothy perm a "come-hither" look. A state trooper appeared at her side, imploringly. She rose from her chair and stepped into the roiling currents of American history. It is a Horatio Alger story for our time. It could have happened to anybody wearing mascara...
...halogens were banned from the Yard this year, the steps down the path to squinting adulthood have been brought to historic Harvard standards. This class of first-years has something new in common with the former residents of their rooms, with John Quincy Adams, Class of 1787, and Horatio Alger, Class of 1852: they too can experience the Yard dorms as if by candlelight, huddled over their books in the corners of dark, gaping rooms...
...same time, the firm's employees became both rich and famous. Vice President Marc Andreessen was a Horatio Alger for the 1990s, parlaying the fruits of an eight-dollar-an-hour campus coding job into a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. At one point, Netscape banned real-time stock tickers from company computers, as millionaire employees spent the days watching their net worth increase with the value of their options...
...Whittaker Chambers (Random House) Historian Sam Tanenhaus rights an old imbalance in this scrupulous biography. For more than 40 years, most discussions of the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair focused on Hiss: innocent, as he claimed, or guilty, as Chambers charged? But of the two, Chambers was by far the more interesting person and tormented soul. Tanenhaus' perceptive illumination of Chambers' life also lights up a dark, troubled period of American history...
This sort of behavior seems strangely at odds with the ideal of the American dream, that perennial occupant of this country's collective unconscious which causes us to love the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger, class of 1852, sort of underdog who beats the odds and from poor and humble beginnings acquires vast wealth. If we love successful underdogs as they approach fame and fortune, why do we not continue to love them as they attain ever-higher pinnacles of achievement, whether it be by doubling and redoubling their billions or by winning an increasingly ridiculous number of consecutive championships...