Word: boom
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...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...
...fashioned by men like Abdallah, which now account for roughly 80% of U.S. deaths, up from 50% at the start of the year. "People are calling me all the time, asking for new ways to ..." Abdallah says, pressing down his right thumb on an imaginary remote control, and adds, "... Boom...