Word: knew
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money - charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 - but about a million more people volunteered their...
That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...standard advice for young writers has always been "Write what you know." Raymond Carver did exactly that. It so happens that for most of his life, what Carver knew best was hardship, both physical and psychological. In his short stories--tight-lipped parables of abjection that became hugely influential in the 1980s--life is a kind of nonstop distress sale. The apartments are shabby; the rent is unpaid; the living room furniture has been carried outside and strewn across the lawn. The people seem dislocated too, even when they're stuck in one place, licking their wounds and drinking hard...
...Carol Sklenicka's judicious, thorough and sometimes harrowing biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (Scribner; 578 pages), we learn just how well Carver knew the worlds he wrote about. He grew up mostly in blue collar Yakima, Wash., where his father worked in a sawmill, changed jobs frequently and drank heavily, patterns he passed on to his son. Carver was barely 18 when he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, but he had already dedicated himself to life as a writer...
...toxic chemicals used in the process. When he had trouble finding a greener cleaner in New York City, Kistner had an epiphany - he'd start his own. The result is Green Apple Cleaners, which uses a variety of environmentally friendly methods to dry-clean suits, shirts and dresses. "I knew there had to be a better way," says Kistner. "When I couldn't find it, we made it ourselves." (See pictures of NYC going green...