Word: fiction
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Sometimes you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And that's the thought-experiment author Alan Weisman presents in his book The World Without Us - TIME's #1 Non-Fiction book of 2007. What if humanity were to vanish? What would happen to our planet? TIME's Amy Lennard Goehner discusses these and other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it questions with the author...
...Susan Sontag described horror and science fiction as "the imagination of disaster." The innovation is in thinking the unthinkable, not creating rounded or even plausible characters. In fact, human idiocy is a crucial aspect of a genre that trades in mortal threat. If the characters holed themselves away in some safe place, they'd never meet the monster. They have to be at risk in order to escape, or get trampled, and for us to get a cheap but essential movie thrill...
...thought. The two became an odd and inseparable pair, loving each other with an explicit allowance for outside dalliances. Under that agreement, she fell passionately in love, twice, and had a lifelong affair with crying and alcohol. A haphazard dresser and global traveler, Beauvoir also had no reservations about fictionalizing her liaisons with female philosophy students, whom she passed on to Sartre. We would be mistaken, however, to reduce her eccentricities to a life of temerity and scandal. Beauvoir inspired millions of women through conferences on her magnum opus, The Second Sex. Her encyclopedic letters to Sartre shaped his thought...
...ratings-sensitive advertising, Sarkozy said, would allow public TV to quit trying to match the popular but mind-numbing game shows and reality television that now dominate the schedules of private broadcasters for what Sarkozy called "purely mercantile" reasons. Instead, public broadcasters could focus on quality documentary, educational, and fiction programming. "This is a revolution that, by changing the economic model of public television, would change the entire nature of cultural policy in our communication society," Sarkozy said...
...people in Japan that demands to be heard," says John Possman, former head of Tokyo entertainment consultancy Dragonfly Revolution. "It is truly pop culture." It has also become big business. In major book wholesaler Tohan's 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai shosetsu, including the top three. The new genre is provoking fierce indignation among Japan's literati, many of whom think that keitai shosetsu should stay on cell-phone screens. But it is undeniably shaking up a publishing industry whose sales have been declining for a decade...