Word: essayists
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John Waters understands. For a quarter-century, the 47-year-old filmmaker has been America's pre-eminent satirist of domestic depravity. He is also an elegant comic essayist, who puckishly wrote in 1985 that killing a celebrity is "the only sure-fire route to overnight front-page fame." And he is a connoisseur of the judicially sensational, attending many a grotesque trial. Waters can sagely note the media's glamorizing and merchandising of felony -- "These days you can commit a crime, and two weeks later it's a TV movie" -- and in the next breath give a rave review...
...traditional metaphor for this is that of a mosaic. But Richard Rodriguez, the Mexican-American essayist who is a psalmist for our new hybrid forms, points out that the interaction is more fluid than that, more human, subject to daily revision. "I am Chinese," he says, "because I live in San Francisco, a Chinese city. I became Irish in America. I became Portuguese in America." And even as he announces this new truth, Portuguese women are becoming American, and Irishmen are becoming Portuguese, and Sydney (or is it Toronto?) is thinking to compare itself with the "Chinese city" we know...
...Hosokawa clan ruled southwestern Japan from the 16th to the mid-19th century and produced important historical figures, including the father and son Yusai (1534-1610) and Tadaoki (1563-1646), who prospered under all three military rulers who unified Japan. The new Prime Minister "makes people feel history," says essayist Yoshimi Ishikawa. "Everyone can participate in discussions about his family...
Describing television's replacement of radio and newspapers as the country's most influential journalistic medium, Schorr paraphrased essayist E.B. White...
Kinsley, who had been writing for the New Republic since he was 25 (he is now 42), became a TIME essayist largely because he found the thought of writing for an audience roughly 50 times the size of his regular one irresistible. Before his debut, though, he was a bit dubious about this magazine's ways; he commented quizzically on our practice of distilling vast numbers of words into the tiny percentage that see print. Now he is part of the process: a recent Essay he wrote about taxes somehow never appeared. Is he bothered? "Goes with the territory...