Word: commonality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...game time against Oberlin, the Swarthmore students weren't behaving like Quakers. Close to 200 showed up for the game--not bad on a campus of 1,380. It is more common to see students at games wearing Swarthmore math department T shirts (WE MATH GOOD) than football jerseys. "A lot of people don't care about football here," said senior Paul Dickson, an engineering major. "It doesn't exactly fit into the culture." But the team's ignominious run has aroused the curious. Said another senior, Abbas Ebrahim: "There's the whole Cinderella thing about the streak...
Purdy's mind, however, is another matter. With the publication of his first book--For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (Knopf; 256 pages; $20)--the brainy nature boy has stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness. Reduced to simple headlines, Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letter- man. "The ironic individual," he writes, "is a bit like Seinfeld without a script; at ease in banter, versed...
Despite its publisher's hope that Purdy's book will hit it big with thoughtful twentysomethings starved for meaning in a vacuous time, For Common Things is an arduous read that would test the syntactical skills of a tenured professor. It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years. Insufferably smug, however, Purdy is not, particularly when it comes to his anointment as an instant wise man for the millennium. "Irony," he elegantly...
Shingles (a.k.a. herpes zoster) is a common ailment. Over the course of a lifetime, 2 out of every 10 people who have had chicken pox will experience its misery. But while the disease can strike at any time, the risk increases sharply after age 50. Why? Probably because older people have fewer antibodies against varicella-zoster circulating in their bloodstream. Also at high risk are those whose immune systems are compromised, such as AIDS and transplant patients...
DIED. HERBERT STEIN, 83, economist and former Nixon adviser; in Washington. Stein, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was a key architect of Nixon's policies, including battling inflation through wage controls. But he eschewed ideological loyalty in favor of common sense and was critical of policies of Reagan and Bush...