Word: authority
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Flea-market aficionados insist that eBay is doing a more abstract kind of damage: it's destroying the pleasures of the offline collectibles world. Al Hoff, author of Thrift Score and collector of "everything but Levolor blinds," says eBay has changed the atmosphere in flea markets and thrift stores. She now comes across entrepreneurs who are trolling the aisles looking for items they can resell for a higher price online. "The code of ethics used to be that you bought things for yourself," she notes. And she objects that eBay's efficiency is making it harder for bargain hunters like...
...flocking to a new exhibition, "The Story of Time," which examines time from cultural, religious, artistic and scientific viewpoints. On this side of the Atlantic, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has opened a permanent show on America's fascination with time. In bookstores, best-selling author James Gleick's Faster (Pantheon), which laments the accelerating pace of our lives, will be joined next month by The End of Time (Oxford University Press), British physicist Julian Barbour's treatise on the idea that time doesn't even exist. It's nothing more, he says, than an illusion...
Factories, meanwhile, required workers to begin their days together: it's no coincidence that inexpensive alarm clocks and wristwatches began appearing at the end of the 1800s. "In the 19th century," says historian Michael O'Malley, author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, "we were urged to merge our sense of time with mechanical devices. It allowed for new forms of social organization...
...WAITING by Ha Jin. A doctor in the Chinese army wants to divorce his wife, who lives back in his native village, and marry a nurse. Years and years pass, and the doctor gets no closer to his heart's desire. The author's gently comic rendering of this ordeal won him, deservedly, a 1999 National Book Award...
Garbarino is professor of human development at Cornell University and is author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them