Word: key
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tracking rumors and talking to Kaufman's family and friends, Alexander and Karaszewski had no clue who the real Andy was or how to structure a screenplay about him. It was only after one of Kaufman's girlfriends told them "there is no real Andy" that they found the key to their movie--the comic with multiple personalities was actually an invisible man. With that notion as their guide, they wrote Man on the Moon, a movie nearly as ambiguous as Kaufman himself...
...key, though, in Eliot and other 20th century poets and novelists, lay in the prominence of the pronoun I--the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously exalted by his diminished status...
...Johnson connects relativism to the extreme nationalism of 20th century political movements in his generally persuasive view of Modern Times. The relationship he cites is sometimes elliptical. What one can say is that the destruction of absolutes--monarchies no less than Newtonian physics--created a vacuum, and in certain key places that vacuum was filled by maniacs and murderers...
...Empire. The most prolific memes had long since spread to Byzantium if not beyond, and would keep replicating themselves even as Western Europe struggled to regroup. Thus the astrolabe would eventually be reintroduced to the area via Islamic culture, which thrived during the early Middle Ages. Meanwhile, in Asia, key memes would arise--the spinning wheel, even printing--and some would migrate all the way to Europe...
After creating one of the Net's top brands, a company with a market value of some $20 billion, Pierre Omidyar hit the delete key. Months before eBay's IPO--the traditional media coronation for a Silicon Valley wunderkind--he stepped aside in favor of onetime Hasbro exec Meg Whitman. "I've obviously tried to push her to the forefront," he says. "Meg's the public face of the company." Omidyar moved to France in part to get in touch with his roots--he was born in Paris and lived there until he was six. But he's also working...