Word: casuals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Barrages of mass-produced sounds and images targeted to weaken consumer resistance and sway opinion have made the new literary generation knowing observers of style and class. Most share affluent backgrounds and a sense of being entitled to the best brand names, higher education, sex, drugs and psychotherapy. Their casual sophistication is worn two sizes too big. The best characters in their fiction are invariably white, bright and dangerous to know, like the autobiographical narrator of McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and his sidekick Tad Allagash, a stripling adman and Manhattan party animal with inexhaustible supplies of Bolivian Marching...
Only a decade ago food was so scarce that the threat of starvation was an everyday fact of life for tens of millions of Chinese. Today shop windows are filled with chickens and ducks, and open-air markets are overflowing with fresh vegetables. But if even the casual visitor to China in recent years could see that agricultural sufficiency had come at last to a country historically plagued by famine, few Westerners truly appreciate the magnitude of that achievement or understand how it came about. Under Deng Xiaoping's regime, the Chinese have become the most efficient farmers...
...matter what Patterson's motives, it is time to say that no racist remark or incident can be overlooked or dismissed. When people accept casual racial slurs, they reinforce attitudes that have no place. Such intolerable attitudes can lead to more overt and destructive racism...
...bills when she did not. In important matters, which meant clothes and horses, she went first-class. She had women friends -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was an early protector -- but she liked men better. Her maternal instinct was fitful at best, and her appetite for casual sex made uproarious disarray of her marriages. Blixen once wrote of her own husband Bror (who became Beryl's occasional bedmate) that "he looked down benevolently and lasciviously upon womankind and had been raised to believe that the entire world existed, as did the fish in his streams and the game in his woods...
Well, there is help. Just make a quick phone call, and a compact van, stocked with thousands of solutions, will arrive at your door. A driver- decorator (98% are women) will survey the immediate problems and analyze whether your inclinations are in the formal, casual, transitional or luxurious mode. Then, presto! Out from the van can come decks of fabric swatches, wheels of paint chips, pages of wall coverings, rows of baked tiles, furniture catalogs -- even lamps and statuary. For customers who like things fancy, there are silk screens, antique engravings, custom-framed landscapes and Old Master reproductions -- a Degas...