Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This well-directed busyness is shared by Edith Langley, hero of Golden Days, who has awakened from the coma of two bad marriages with the understanding that a girl has got to hustle. This is how she did it: "I made myself up half hour by hour. I rented myself out to silicone chip places. I got myself a weekly financial column at the city's 'second' paper, which got me to parties, which got me to cute guys, which got me to some financial meetings of small businesses, and little by little I was able to build...
...assumptions of Golden Days is that testosterone is the most unstable element in the universe. When men, the sole possessors of penises and nuclear missiles, go wrong, the result is usually bad. See's holocaust is foreshadowed by a catalog of vague fears. The cause of the actual disaster is left unclear, although the reader has been prepared for its reason: the inevitability of male conflict. This is a stimulating and not unreasonable assertion, although it is not convincingly worked out as fiction. Neither is the author's romantic projection that the destruction is a new beginning that will eliminate...
...Good or bad, adequate or not, is some better than none? Does sex education work? So far, studies on the subject have been fragmentary, unconvincing or massively inconclusive. A six-volume 1984 analysis by Mathtech Inc. of nine programs around the country came to the deflating conclusion after a seven- year investigation that sex-ed courses had almost no effect on contraceptive use, views about premarital sex, or such social skills as assertiveness and , self-understanding. The only significant changes in behavior and attitude came in the two programs with strong backing from parents and the local community...
...computer class, a bookbag slung jauntily over one shoulder. But when he leaves the refuge of the classroom, Alston returns to the buzzing confusion of the Fort Washington Armory in New York City, an enormous room that sleeps as many as 900 men. Alston's luck went bad after he lost his job as a security guard last July and then had to leave his apartment after a dispute with his roommate. "When I first got to the shelter," he said, "I wondered what I had gotten into. I had never been in anything like this -- the odor, the dirt...
Ecologists have been working for years to improve the quality of the Rhine's water, but that project has now been set back at least a decade. Indeed, as the bad news mounted, even the river's legend seemed in peril. In a front-page cartoon, the German weekly Die Zeit showed the mythic Lorelei looking lost and forlorn. The reason: chemicals were making the maiden's hair fall...