Word: decay
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...easy to tell that from How to Be Alone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages), a collection of lucid, saturnine essays that have appeared in various magazines since 1994. Franzen is not the first serious writer to mourn the slow death of serious reading or to be worried about the decay of the moral imagination, each a continuing subtheme in a book that lights upon everything from the Chicago postal system to his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. But his estrangement is so persuasive that he makes alienation seem like the first sign of a healthy mind...
...things are improving. The L.A. sheriff's office runs forensics courses for detectives that include fake murder scenes staged at a Residence Inn. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville maintains a politely named Anthropological Research Facility, a body farm where dozens of human remains lie in various states of decay in open fields to help forensic scientists better understand decomposition...
...good gossip. At its best, Live from New York is a frank, perceptive group biography of smart, ultra-verbal people loving and hating one another under intense pressure. Ralph Nader, who once hosted the show, chalks up SNL's success to the decline of civilization: "When the culture decays and the communications media decay," he remarks, "then something as weak as ... Saturday Night Live shines." Live from New York shines as well, and perhaps that's cultural decay too. But maybe it's because what happens on Saturday night is never half as interesting as the aftermath on Sunday morning...
...decay that was common in urban areas a generation ago, some experts say, has begun spreading to nearby suburbs. Others note that more big companies are relocating to the suburbs from expensive city centers, drawing more people with borderline incomes...
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich garnered the Ig Nobel in Physics by showing that beer froth diminishes according to the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay...