Word: boom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Though the country has had something of an economic boom of late, the blush is off the rose. Prices are rising and blackouts common. Extremist groups have gained power-last week an Islamic court in the tribal areas sentenced and executed four people for adultery. Towns in the northern provinces bordering Afghanistan are run by a Pakistani Taliban that has shut down barbershops, girls' schools and polio-vaccination programs. In Islamabad, students from the fundamentalist Jamia Hafsa seminary have occupied a children's library less than a mile from the Parliament building. Abdul Aziz, head of the Lal Masjid mosque...
...listen to CNBC? Turn the dial a few notches to HGTV, and the housing boom has never been boomier. HGTV, the homespun redoubt of gardening and glue-gun projects that became a cable hit in the post-9/11 cocooning era, is now dominated by what it calls "Property Buzz" shows: series about buying and selling homes, which now make up six of the channel's 10 highest-rated shows. Shows like Secrets That Sell!, Designed to Sell, Bought & Sold, Get It Sold--notice a pattern?--offer a guide to tapping, Jed Clampett--style, the gusher of wealth sitting under...
Like CNBC, HGTV is a creature of a certain economic heyday (the early aughts housing boom, as opposed to the late-'90s NASDAQ bubble) that has had to adjust to tough times, in this case by offering escapism that turns head-on into the very thing people want to escape from. (Just as, after 9/11, terrorism became all the rage in pop culture...
...appraiser be that a half-bath is worth exactly $20,000?). But it's brilliant TV, allowing us to indulge a little jealousy (say, of the lucky bastard who bought a Manhattan apartment for $90,000 in 1990) and vicarious money lust. And it demonstrates how the housing boom changed the way people look at their homes: as an expression of their financial savvy rather than their creative selves...
Mandatory national service books The absence of mandatory military service in the baby boom generation has contributed to America's largely slovenly culture. Are We Rome by Cullen Murphy and A Call to Civic Service by Charles Moskos suggest bringing it back...