Word: fisher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Perhaps, then, it's a good thing they have been commemorated in Confessions of a Shopaholic, a movie adaptation of Sophie Kinsella's series of novels about a shopping-obsessed, debt-ridden young English journalist named Becky Bloomwood (Isla Fisher). As a romantic comedy, it is forgettable. But as an ill-timed anthropological artifact, Confessions offers weird pleasures, not least among them the fact that it makes us root for the debt collector. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...Reframed in the movie as an American, Becky is a classic case of the aspirational shopper, scarred by a childhood full of sensible brown shoes and thrift-store shopping with her mother (Joan Cusack, who in real life is all of 14 years older than Fisher). "When I shop, the world gets better," Becky says dreamily. "And then it's not, and I need to do it again...
...Fisher, an Australian actress whose breakthrough moment happened around a dinner table with Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers, is a nifty performer. Her charms are enough to keep the movie - entering the marketplace just as the country's financial situation becomes truly dire - from being criminally distasteful. She's got that rare gift for making slapstick seem organic. Confessions runs her through the chick-flick moves of endearment (walk into glass, run in high heels, spill food on self and others), but there are a few scenes where she cuts loose and we get to see her Lucille Ball-style...
...times of upheaval, nothing offers safe harbor like science. That's where Helen Fisher comes in. A biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, she combed through reams of genetic literature and analyzed the answers to 40,000 surveys she conducted on the dating site Chemistry.com for which she is a paid adviser. Her research led her inside the biological mechanisms of mate choice. In Why Him? Why Her?, Fisher posits that there are four broad temperament types--"explorer," "builder," "director" and "negotiator." Each of these types is expressive of a different neurochemical system: dopamine and norepinephrine; serotonin; testosterone; and estrogen. Using...
...When you're on a date, if you understand your primary type and the type of person whom you're going out with," suggests Fisher, "you can better reach them and create more intimacy." (One telltale sign: the ring fingers of directors are longer than their index fingers.) In the future, might singletons be able to use a blood test to zero in on prospective mates, saving us a lot of effort and enabling us to wear jewelry? "Possibly," she says...