Word: jesting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Franzen's gloomy observation has not deflected him or three other gifted writers of his acquaintance: Donald Antrim, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, last year's young literary comet. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names...
...Infinite Jest (Little, Brown). The year's longest good novel, at 1,079 pages, is by turns enthralling and exasperating, with the emphasis on the former. David Foster Wallace brilliantly extrapolates cultural and commercial trends into a nightmarishly funny near future, where years are named after products. One of the many subplots involves a movie, Infinite Jest, that can literally make its viewers die laughing. Readers, beware...
...epiphany came a decade ago, when as a free-lance writer he stumbled into the Well, cyberspace's oldest and best-known hole-in-the-wall. For whatever reasons, online communication tends to be a dissent amplifier. You say something half in jest; the bad half gets picked up and further inflamed. The next thing you know, war has erupted, and people end up not talking for a year. Rheingold took it on himself to parachute in and reconnect disembodied souls...
...socialist. Whatever people think of the President's tacking to accommodate the polls, a large majority are certain that Mrs. Clinton is an old-fashioned liberal. So recall what she said at a Democratic fund-raiser last spring (no matter that her aides insist she was speaking in jest). "Give Bill a second term, and I will be turned loose to do what we really want...
...like it to be known that I actually graduated from here," McNealy joked in reference to Gates, who did not finish his undergraduate education at Harvard. "I'm still trying to make up for the two-and-a-half year head start," he added in jest. --By Amita Shukla