Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This summer scooters have become a hot accessory, popping up in movies (American Pie, the new Austin Powers), fashion spreads, music videos and ads (Doc Martens, IBM). Especially popular on both coasts, Vespas are a favored toy of such celebrities as Ellen DeGeneres (girlfriend Anne Heche gave her one) and Jerry Seinfeld (who paid some $10,000 for his rare 1962 Grand Sport). So popular have they become that Piagio plans to return to the U.S. market with environmentally compliant Vespas in 2000. "This is the year for scooters," says Erik Larson of the Scooter Shop in Orange, Calif...
...phase in political non-discourse is Hillary Clinton, the nation's most prominent office seeker. But let's be fair. After all, she is only one of many politicians who have recently--no, wait. Let's not be fair. Like her husband, Mrs. Clinton senses unerringly the trajectories of American politics and manages with supernatural ease to embody them. Thus as she begins her pursuit of office she declines to become a campaigner. She has become a listener...
...people to weigh the importance of what is disclosed. There is good reason to believe, post-Clinton, that we have arrived at a time in which the public can sort out what's important and what is merely embarrassing. Do most candidates have that sort of trust in the American people? Bill Clinton certainly didn't, devising an impressively precise series of half-admissions that allowed him to get elected twice...
...branched out); MTV's Biorhythm and VH1's triple threat, Where Are They Now?, Before They Were Rock Stars and the flagship Behind the Music (pop music); Lifetime's Intimate Portrait (women); CNN's Pinnacle and Movers (business); and Fox Family Channel's Famous Families (guess). C-SPAN's American Presidents profiles the 41 Chief Executives in order--though it won't, alas, cover Grover Cleveland in two nonconsecutive broadcasts...
...tearful interviews, the wedding footage and--that sine qua non money shot--the baby pictures: it can be hard for the uninitiated to tell the shows apart. But there are identifiable categories. Educational, middlebrow offerings like Biography and PBS's American Masters aim to be definitive (and, more rarely, hard-hitting), while entertainment channels tend toward frothy love letters like CMT Showcase. Others are hybrids, like Bravo's brainy Bravo Profiles, which delves into artists' creative processes--it's fan mail, but in iambic pentameter. Likewise, Intimate Portrait has a classy roster of "women of substance," which it treats with...