Word: construction
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...misogyny, money worship and drug euphoria was embraced by hip-hop and gangsta rap. Scarface, Tucker claims, was more than just vulgar escapism. As the story caught on with urban audiences via home video, fans started filling in and expanding the story - going beyond the literal screenplay to construct alternate meanings and messages. Gradually it became a rallying cry for a subculture that was, in the early 1980s, just coming into its own. "A quarter-century after its release," Tucker writes, "it remains elusive yet pervasive, the movie that will not go away, but which pops up where you least...
...That Chopra is a smoothie - who in his quest to construct a pleasing and seamless model of the universe tends to jump to easy conclusions and to spackle over problematic gaps and inconsistencies in the ideas he presents - is obvious to all but his most starry-eyed fans. But grousing about such crimes - as many do - does little to explain his enormous popularity. Chopra is as rich as he is today not because he has been dishonest with anyone, but because his basic message - that love, health and happiness are possible, that mystery is real and that the universe...
...Consensus There are fault lines in the Obama coalition, to be sure. In a two-party system, it's impossible to construct a majority without bringing together people who disagree on big things. But Obama's majority is at least as cohesive as Reagan's or F.D.R.'s. The cultural issues that have long divided Democrats - gay marriage, gun control, abortion - are receding in importance as a post-'60s generation grows to adulthood. Foreign policy doesn't divide Democrats as bitterly as it used to either because, in the wake of Iraq, once-hawkish working-class whites have grown more...
...latest book, Payback: Debt as Metaphor and the Shadow Side of Wealth, isn't just her first nonfiction book not about literature; it's also a series of speeches. Atwood has turned Payback into a Canadian Broadcast Corporation Massey Lecture Series, in which she explores debt as a cultural construct, from favor-trading in chimpanzee societies to, well, favor-trading among the Corleone clan in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. This is not a book about how to get out of financial debt or how to manage your accounts. In fact, the last third of the book focuses...
...sand dunes of Scotland's northeast coast have a rugged, unadorned beauty and understated elegance. So when Donald Trump flew his private Boeing jet into Aberdeen airport in 2006 and announced, with typical Trumpian bombast, that he intended to construct a billion-dollar-plus development on the dunes that would include the "greatest golf course ever constructed," he set the stage for a protracted conservation battle that on Monday reached the highest level of Scottish government...