Word: fad
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Felker is an idea editor, not a pencil editor. He has had remarkably accurate antennae for coming fashions -and a knack for catchy headlines that are often better than the articles and make each fad seem momentous. The list of writers for whom he has provided a springboard is also impressive. As features editor of Esquire from 1957 to 1962, he helped steer Norman Mailer into reportage and published some of the first so-called New Jourrialists, most notably Tom Wolfe. On the old New York Herald Tribune, where he edited the Sunday magazine that was to be reincarnated...
...reject the noble image of literature as a divine inspiration. In our view, language is a kind of putty that we can shape." Among the stranger shapes issuing from the OuLiPo factory are palindromes-words or statements that read identically backward and forward. "Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts," is elementary to an OuLiPo member. Perec has produced Ou LiPo's longest palindrome: a 5,000-letter treatise-on palindromes. Other OuLiPoian inventions are equally astonishing. Poet Jean Lescure's N (or V) +7 formula takes the noun or verb of a given...
Hillier's remarkable weight loss is the result not of some new dieting fad but of the oldest, surest and quickest way to get rid of excess fat: fasting. Along with others afflicted with severe obesity, he had enrolled in a pioneering fasting clinic at Cleveland's Mount Sinai Hospital. Except for a powdery mix of mainly alanine (an amino acid) and glucose that is taken with water or diet drinks, patients at the clinic eat nothing whatsoever for weeks and months at a time, starving off their pounds...
...board game in 1971, his father, a Shakespearean scholar, duly noted that the appeal of the game was based on a series of "dramatic reversals." Perhaps, he suggested, it should be called Othello. Today Othello is a national pastime played by some 25 million Japanese-and a full-blown fad replete with towels, tie clasps, and key chains, all emblazoned with the distinctive Othello emblem. Spearheaded by Fumio Fujita, 27, a barber from outside Tokyo and the game's reigning champion, Othello has invaded England...
...Greed. This kind of self-absorption has stirred research into narcissism. The emphasis on it in psychoanalysis, says Donald Kaplan, "is partly an intellectual fad, partly a response to the kind of patients we started to get in the mid-'60s-people in constant pursuit of new experiences to make their sense of self more palpable and acquit themselves of being less than their neighbors." Psychoanalyst Hendin agrees: "When I grew up, there was a greed for material things; now it's a very egocentric greed for experience." Today, says Hendin, "the culture has made caring seem like...