Word: localism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China know. His first novel, which has been nominated for a National Book Award, makes local color intimately familiar...
...worked at the local Illinois library that Kaczynski's parents visited weekly for their reading material. I have a very hard time recognizing dear Wanda Kaczynski in the words of her son Ted. Can this possibly be the sweet, intellectual lady with whom I had so many conversations about literature on quiet afternoons in a peaceful library setting? I don't feel she was the ogre described by her son. We at the library felt warmly toward her; she was a pleasure to know. EMMY SWEDA Lombard...
...have a couple we idealize. For some it's Burns and Allen, for others it's Tracy and Hepburn, and for yet others it's Siegfried and Roy. For me it was Howard and Alison Stern. I became infatuated with their marriage in sixth grade, listening to Stern's local radio show after school. Here was a guy who was married but getting away with spanking strippers. As an 11-year-old I didn't know much about marriage, but if it included spanking strippers, I was ready to take my vows...
...unusual species. With the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, we became the first species in the 3.7 billion-year history of life not to be living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin...
...short, we declared open war on the very local ecosystems that had until then been our home. As preagricultural hunter-gatherers, we humans held niches in ecosystems, and those niches, resource-limited as they always were, had indeed kept our numbers down. Estimates vary, but a figure of roughly 6 million people on Earth at the beginning of agriculture is reasonable. By 1798 the population reached 900 million. Agriculture altered how we related to the natural world and, in liberating us from the confines of the local ecosystem, removed the Malthusian lid in one fell swoop...