Word: mania
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Baby Boom and She's Having a Baby. Even television commercials are using giggling, gurgling newborns to shill for grownup products such as carpets, insurance and automobile tires. Yet despite the highly visible new crop of infants, not all Americans are sure they want to help fuel the baby mania. Observes UCLA Psychologist Jacqueline Goodchilds: "Many people are questioning the assumption that fulfillment for a woman is having children...
...current expectations among an increasingly rich and fastidious clientele it is entirely plausible to imagine a dissatisfied traveler to Florida bringing a lawsuit against the sun." But tireless denials of the infinite efficacy of wealth ultimately cost the author his sense of humor, and he begins to manifest the mania he condemns, in looking-glass fashion. The "civil religion" of unbridled capitalism makes everything awful to him. Among his complaints: the plethora of soaps and deodorizing products available to U.S. consumers, the lamentable historical and geographic illiteracy of most Americans, and the fact that Hollywood actresses feel the need...
...Dana Mania: Freshman point guard Dana Smith played two of his finest games for Harvard this weekend. The rookie was 5-for-5 from the field on the weekend, and netted a career-high seven points against Princeton...
...Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting. The plot is merely serviceable and the cast of characters sprawling rather than sharply defined, but the machine-gun barrage of witticisms from its formidable ladies is either a well-researched compendium of bons mots or a wholly convincing imitation...
...without its ironies. The Belle Epoque also saw the high- water mark of Japanese influence on French painting and decorative arts. The Western taste for lacquer, fans, screens and wood-block prints that began soon after Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 had become a mania in Paris by the 1890s. Japanism was all the rage. "I envy the Japanese the extreme clearness which everything has in their work . . . They do a figure in a few sure strokes as if it were as simple as buttoning your waistcoat." It is Vincent van Gogh writing from Arles...