Word: fin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Great Soul, endures in the best part of our minds, where our ideals are kept: the embodiment of human rights and the creed of nonviolence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is something else, an eccentric of complex, contradictory and exhausting character most of us hardly know. It is fashionable at this fin de siecle to use the man to tear down the hero, to expose human pathologies at the expense of larger-than-life achievements. No myth raking can rob Gandhi of his moral force or diminish the remarkable importance of this scrawny little man. For the 20th century--and surely...
...call mathematics a fin-de-siecle craze would be a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something remarkable about how the most arcane of academic disciplines has finally implanted itself firmly in popular culture. The trend began in 1994 when Princeton University's Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a cantankerous problem that had defeated the best mathematical minds for more than 350 years. Not since Archimedes ran naked from his bathtub shouting "Eureka!" has a mathematician received more publicity. PEOPLE magazine put him on its list of "the 25 most intriguing people of the year...
...opera), each show is an apocalyptic circus of startling imagination. Everything is designed to be an illusion--to take you in one direction and then make you refigure (the best example I can think of in "O" has a clown drifting on a raft in an ocean; a shark fin begins to swim around him and he panics; he suddenly calms down, picks up a fishing pole and hooks the fin, pulling it up to reveal a crescent moon which he gleefully hangs in the sky). It's also a decidedly French experience--it's incomparable to anything that...
...mountain, called the Troll Castle, is an unearthly fin of weathered granite that pokes a vertical mile from its icebound surroundings. Only a handful of people knew, or cared, that it existed; fewer still had actually laid eyes on the peak. Alex, Conrad and I were the first who had gone to the trouble to climb it, and the view from the top was ample reward. Countless other rock towers, equally strange and beautiful, rise from the ice in all directions, resembling gargantuan sailboats plying a chalk-white...
Fashion is therefore safe. While many Y2Kers are running around prophesying the end of everything from power grids to rock & roll, the fashion industry has taken on the fin-de-sicle with fervor, dubbing orange the "millennial color" and making fashion picks for the next century. But as the high fashion avant-garde parades forward in full plumage--feather, sequins, fur and leather--many members of the old guard have run for cover. But some, like it-girl Miuccia Prada, were easy converts, spending years preparing for their 15 minutes in the millennial spotlight. Over the last few years, sterile...