Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...week by the news that a four-year-old girl had died following a tonsillectomy, an operation that is almost never deadly. Like 100,000 other Americans each year, Desiree Wade was sent home a few hours after the surgery, which was performed at St. Luke's hospital in Manhattan. She developed a fever and became increasingly sick. Her coughs apparently tore open the surgical wounds in her throat, and she bled to death. There is no evidence that the surgeon did anything wrong, but state health officials are investigating whether the child received the proper follow-up care...
...York attained its now partly lost eminence is the grand theme of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 606 pages; $25), a detail-crammed psychohistory by Ann Douglas, who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University. As she interprets this era, the modern artists who gathered in New York to create a new American culture relied upon "terrible honesty"--a term devised by the crime writer Raymond Chandler--to overthrow the romanticizing, domineering matriarchal ethos of the late Victorian...
Dorothy Parker wanted to call her (unwritten) autobiography Mongrel, presumably reflecting her Wasp-Jewish heritage. Douglas applies the word to the polyglot nature of the new culture, which was profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Writers like Langston Hughes who settled in and around Strivers Row in Upper Manhattan gave distinctive voice to the aspirations of American blacks. "Aframerican" musicians like Duke Ellington entertained white audiences at Harlem's Cotton Club with an exotic new idiom, jazz, that became one of America's enduring gifts to the world...
WHEN TERRENCE MCNALLY'S Love! Valour! Compassion! transferred from off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club to the Walter Kerr Theater last month, it instantly took on a special status: it became the sole new straight play on Broadway, and only the third to open there all season (out of 15 new productions in total). McNally rightly saw the distinction as dubious. "I take very little pleasure in it," he told a luncheon of the American Theater Wing shortly afterwards. "I wish there were 30 new plays on Broadway...
...Early's daughter--handsome, flaky Burry (short for Berenice)--who, like her father, is totally corrupt. She is good at dancing on tables and at rather taxing bouts of sex. She and her fancy Manhattan friends, "a club of frauds who think they are the center of the universe," love that sort of thing. Jack, a dogged public-interest lawyer, falls hard for Burry. Before long he is doing dirty tricks for Early's henchmen and bungling them: he snaps a photo of an opponent's "mistress" who turns out to be his sister. At the time Jack's only...