Word: americans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story begins with a dream. It wasn't the Great American Dream - Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn't sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream...
...movie done fast, to keep up the momentum, and she was burned out. Enter Chris Weitz, who was not, by his own admission, the obvious choice. "There was a reasonable amount of skepticism when I took over the second movie," he says. "I understand that. I directed American Pie. I would be worried too." But after a 2½-hour phone conversation with Meyer - a fan of Weitz's About a Boy - she gave him her blessing...
...Iran's top prosecutor announced espionage charges against three American hikers who were arrested in July for illegally crossing the border from Iraq. Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd, who say they strayed into the country unwittingly, have spent more than 100 days in Tehran's Evin prison and have twice met with Swiss diplomats tasked with negotiating their release. The charges, which carry the death penalty, come amid stalled talks with the U.S. over Iran's controversial nuclear program, just months after the espionage conviction of American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi was overturned after heavy diplomatic pressure...
...mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream...
...while optimism is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money - charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 - but about...