Word: americans
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...world goes mad," writes journalist Ethan Watters. He traces how conditions first widely diagnosed in the U.S., such as anorexia and PTSD, have spread abroad "with the speed of contagious diseases." The growth of Big Pharma and the widespread adoption of U.S. health standards have made the ailing American psyche the primary diagnostic model. By 2008, for example, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil a year to the Japanese, who didn't know they had a problem with depression until drug marketers informed them. Though Watters' indignation can be wearying at times, he is on to something...
What ever happened to David Mamet? It may seem an odd question to ask about a playwright who is so constantly with us. No fewer than three of his plays--American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna--have been revived on Broadway in just the past year or so. His terse, fragmented, elliptical dialogue; his rogue's gallery of hustlers, con men and losers; his twisty, shaggy-dog plots; his cynical take on the American dream--Mamet's style and themes have seeped into nearly every pore of American theater. (Non-American theater too: Martin McDonagh, whose Irish black comedies...
...Mamet's reputation as a major playwright rests on a surprisingly slim body of work, rapidly receding into the distance. Only two or three of his plays--American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and perhaps his scalding one-act Edmond (1982)--can fairly be called masterpieces. What's more, Mamet, 62, has been on a steady downhill slide for nearly two decades, bottoming out with his labored period piece Boston Marriage, in 1999, and his brutally unfunny political farce November, which landed on Broadway two years...
...seem shockingly glib and opportunistic. "This isn't about sex. It's about race," goes the exchange that brings down the curtain in one scene. "What's the difference?" Make sense of that line, and you just might be able to make sense of where the most important American playwright of his generation has gone wrong. Good luck...
...turned out to be the year of the antihero. It is the year in which Joe Lieberman gets my nod--cynical though it is--as 'American of the Year.' A Democrat of convenience, Lieberman has succeeded in doing what Benedict Arnold couldn't. In a masterful act of treachery, he retains a position of trust among the very people he betrayed...