Word: contentions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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FATTY ARBUCKLE ACCUSED: In 1921, the comic was charged with, but never convicted of, the rape and murder of a starlet he met at an orgy SPAWNED: The Hays code, an attempt to clean up Hollywood's image by limiting sexual content in films...
...almost as if the producers of popular culture sensed, and tried instinctively to compensate for, this defect. For the content of movies, popular music, latterly television, has remained stubbornly locked to the 19th century traditions of melodrama and romance. We may admire the multiple narrators of Citizen Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass...
...only the beginning of a tide of print that has been rising ever since. We can hardly imagine a world without an abundance of printed matter, and thus we take for granted an invention that produced astonishing consequences. Early printed books tended to resemble, in appearance as well as content, the hand-copied manuscripts they were replacing. The dissemination of the writings of Greek and Roman authors led to a revival of the classical learning that spurred the Renaissance. Printed religious texts put the word of God directly into the hands of lay readers. Such personal contacts helped fuel...
...merengue tape, bought at a gas station, tinkles quietly from the speakers. We offer them--we offer everyone--water, cookies, crackers. They decline, and like most riders, this family says nothing unless we speak first; they don't even talk to one another. They watch the countryside pass, content. We are surprised, with them and most riders, that they do not want to know where we're from. Why are they not curious about us, the Americans here to save them? At their house, a bent-over salmon-colored ranch on a brown-dirt street, they...
...soften long-standing restrictions on soy as a meat replacement. The agency proposed using soy as an alternative to some of the meats in school lunch menus. American school refectories, which depend heavily on pork, poultry and beef, have been hard-pressed to meet government limits for fat content in lunches, even as school-age children gain weight at a record pace. Predictably, ranchers, chicken and pig farmers are raising a ruckus over the agency's proposal - but analysts predict the increasingly health-conscious public is ready for tasty alternatives to meat. "Soy's time has come," the USDA undersecretary...