Word: evenly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Spam hardly needs an introduction. Anyone with an e-mail account knows the acute frustration of being inundated with offers of pills from virtual pharmacists, financial propositions from Nigerian princes and pictures for fetish sites that really, really shouldn't exist. Spam has even gone beyond e-mail: like kudzu, it adapts to clog whatever online inbox you might choose. On Oct. 30, the social-networking site Facebook won a $711 million judgment against the self-proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace. Wallace, a professional e-mail marketer from New Hampshire who also likes to be called Spamford, used ill-gotten...
...earning authors, he is widely seen as a torchbearer for the generation born after the beginning of the country's opening to the outside world, a group the Chinese call the "post-'80s generation": apolitical, money- and status-obsessed children of the country's explosive economic boom. Even China's most notorious anti-Establishment figure, 52-year-old artist and activist Ai Weiwei, called Han "brave, clear-minded, dynamic and humorous" and predicted that he would be the "gravedigger" for the older generation of writers and artists. (See the top 100 novels of all time...
...time when China's authorities appear to be continually increasing censorship of the Internet, it's remarkable that Han has not been muzzled. But there apparently are limits even for rebels with no particular cause. Han's latest project is a literary magazine that remains nameless following a rejection by the government of Han's proposed title, Renaissance of Art and Literature. Asked why the title was rejected, he blurts an expletive and launches into a characteristic rant: "Oftentimes [the authorities] are just messed up in the head. No one knows what they are thinking." Least of all Han. "Lots...
Yakuza gang bosses in Japan give interviews on TV, dine openly with politicians and traditionally hand out business cards, so everyone knows how to find them. Roughly 40,000 mobsters belong to the Yamaguchi-gumi alone. Everybody knows that the yakuza get money from bars and restaurants, construction companies, even private-detective agencies. But these days some of their principal businesses include securities trading and management consulting. They are increasingly, Jake Adelstein tells us in his gripping descent into the underworld, Tokyo Vice, like bankers "with guns...
...Adelstein builds his stories with as much surprise and grit as any Al Pacino or Mark Wahlberg movie, blurring the lines between the cops, the crooks and even the journalists. "You and I are in the same business," a gangster tells Adelstein early on. "We're in the information industry." As the kid from Missouri begins to disappear deeper and deeper into the demimonde - sleeping in police HQ, drawing dangerously close to a hostess who works at the Den of Delicious and taking on the gangs responsible for human-trafficking in Japan - he comes to lose all sense of where...