Word: length
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...length of the traditional 60-sec. TV ad has been halved a couple of times to keep up with our shortening attention spans. Now 15- and 30-sec. spots dominate, in part because they cost less. One-second ads are even cheaper to buy (Master Lock isn't saying what it paid), and cheaper to make. But can you sell anything in one second? "It's way too early to tell whether--or how--it's going to impact sales," says John Heppner, Master Lock's vice president of marketing...
...understands all. In the best of the films, Decalogue, Six (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery)--also released as the feature-length A Short Film About Love--a young man spies through a telescope on the sexually active stunner across the way. When she learns of his rank love, she is furious; to teach him a lesson she forces upon him the banquet of her sexual favors. Contact shames him; he runs home and slashes his wrists. Visiting his home, she peers through the telescope and sees an eerie vision: herself, as the adoring boy saw her. The image overwhelms...
...subject is touchy, and McKibben goes on at length to show that only children are, on average, perfectly O.K., normal, not lonely and unsocialized, and even likely to do better in school, presumably because of more adult attention. He cites research, some of it a bit woozy-sounding, asserting that "only children show more interest in science, music, math and literature, while kids with siblings care more for...mechanical and technical work, skilled trades, and labor." Yeah, yeah, thinks the reader, concluding (as does McKibben, in fact) that only children are a lot like the rest of us. If your...
McKibben can sound preachy; he and his wife agonized over having a child and decided to have just one ("the light of my life"), after which he had a vasectomy, which he describes at great length. Journalist Margaret Talbot, who erupted at this in the New Republic last week, is unconvinced by "population doomsayers" and rejects a "politically correct family size." Of the author, whom she describes as a "yuppie yogi," she says, "He is irritating not only because he is so wrong, but also because he is so sanctimonious." Irritating but driven by an impulse to keep us from...
...leisurely pace. On Interstate 287, I looked with pity at the other drivers, their tinted windows shut tight, racing to be the first home. They weren't having nearly as much fun as I was. They rushed past me, cutting each other off, fighting to gain even one car length. I thought I knew the secret to a happier existence...