Word: menckenism
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Journalist H.L. Mencken once wrote that his native Baltimore looked "like the ruins of a once-great medieval city." To the TIME staffers who worked on this weeks cover story about Developer James Rouse and Baltimore's urban renaissance, Survival City (as it is sometimes called) had clearly come a long way since Mencken's day. New York Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, who made frequent trips to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1970 to 1975 as TIME's Medicine writer, returned last week to meet with Rouse Co. officials and spend an evening...
...misdirection. Yet even these instructions are offered more in fun than in malice. For early on, the skeptic's skeptic acknowledges that the most obvious evidence of fraud will not budge the True Believer. Instead, Gardner writes for those who agree with the 1920s observation of H.L. Mencken that one horselaugh was worth 10,000 syllogisms. As Science: Good, Bad and Bogus proves, it still is. -By Frederic Golden
...went to jail and revolutionized the now well-known genre of detective fiction. From Red Harvest through The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man and a hundred more short stories, he developed and became the epitome of the hard-boiled but literate writer. He started with short stories in H.L. Mencken's The Smart Set, the home of such luminaries as Fitzgerald and Lewis, Huxley and Maugham, and ended up with the federal government trying to have his body removed from Arlington National Cemetery since Communist bones there would presumably pervert the sacredness of row after row of white crosses...
...violent revolutionary group. In Vega$, a wealthy hotel owner who owes $50 million plans and oversees several murders. Owners or managers of big businesses are almost always filthy rich, with gigantic houses, servants and limousines. There is some honor among small businessmen, but most come off as H.L. Mencken characterized farmers and politicians: candidates for society's dung heap. Concludes the study: "If American business has redeeming social values, they are not visible on prime-time television...
...CRUEL WORLD and hangs itself from the refrigerator door. As with most farce, the movie sags when it runs out of middle-class icons to desecrate. But for any suitably depraved moviegoer, it offers as many honest laughs as Airplane! It's a vision of Baltimore that H.L. Mencken might have loved. As the polyester queen, Divine is woman enough for two-a fleshly-fantasy Miss Piggy. And in one sense, Waters' picture is unique: it's as if you'd never smelled a movie before...