Word: authority
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...liberated. The Vagina Monologues, which has been staged around the world, most notably with an all-star cast in New York City last year, is now off-Broadway, being performed solo by its author. Shorn of the somewhat overbearing I-am-woman-hear-me-roar vibes of the celebrity-studded version, its strengths as a one-woman show become apparent. Sitting on a stool with only a few lighting effects for embellishment, Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights (giving a bravura impression of every type of orgiastic moan) or move us with quiet compassion (a woman in her 70s describes...
...divorce process, marriage counselors say couples often choose to separate as a last-ditch effort to change their relationship, and possibly themselves. "Many trial separations don't work because they're not 'authentic'--they're just one person's way of getting out of the relationship," says Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger. But a separation can give couples time to calm down, renegotiate the rules of the relationship and gain some needed distance...
...recent book For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Jedediah Purdy '97 has written a sermon urging us to take seriously serious things. Above all, the author writes, acknowledge your responsibility to the communities you live in, then shoulder it. For those who want to argue, consistently, against this imperative, there are several vacant cabins in Montana. Jobs on Wall Street await those who do not debate the point. But probably most of us think that working for the common good is not an altogether bad thing. Some of us might admit as much in public...
...Sylvie and Bruno, one of the lesser-known works by the author of Alice in Wonderland, Bruno tells Sylvie that there are 'around one thousand and two pigs" lying in the field. Sylvie responds that if he is not sure of the total number he should say "around one thousand" and ignore the extra two, to which Bruno replies very gravely, that, on the contrary, it is of the two pigs that he is sure because they are right in front of him, while of the other thousand he has no certainty...
...author, an Oxford mathematician called Charles Dodgson who wrote for children under the pen name Lewis Carroll, knew well that one thousand and two is just as arbitrary a number as one thousand. It is only our use of the decimal system that makes us prefer one number to the other. It is this same passion for multiples of ten that will lead to so few people going to bed early on December 31, despite the purely conventional nature of the calendar and the fact that, as we have been told ad nauseam, there was no year zero and therefore...