Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decline of the prophet cartoon also seems to coincide with my sense that, the infectious enthusiasm of crazy comet cults notwithstanding, the new millennium is itself well on the way to becoming played out. For those of us who are neither waiting around for aliens nor gearing up for a fire fight with the new world order, the big rollover is shaping up as the Super Bowl of infrequent calendrical events: overblown and unsatisfying in equal proportion, the last in a long line of 20th century hot-air generators. Newspapers and magazines have already struck up regular millennium sections; special...
...whole millennium thing is basically a hype," says Robert Halmi, who is producing a millennial extravaganza for abc and thus knows whereof he speaks. "But," Halmi continues, "just try to make a reservation for New Year's Eve 1999 at any of the landmark restaurants around the world. It's sold out. So obviously the hype works." In that spirit, ABC asked Halmi, the chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, to come up with something about "what the year 2000 means." A tough question, so Halmi has passed the buck to 10 of America's leading playwrights--John Guare, Larry Gelbart, David...
...least two of the playwrights seem to be duly flummoxed by the nebulousness of the assignment. When asked what the year 2000 means, Gelbart, after some extemporizing, offers that it's a time for "taking stock." Wilson sees the millennium as offering humanity "a clean slate," although he's unsure what that might mean in practice. It will be interesting to see what these artists come up with, and whether any of their pieces will prove that this subject isn't, in fact, best handled by the makers of skin-care products...
Aside from maybe Arbor Day, it would be hard to think of an event more contrived than the millennium, unless one accepts that history unfolds in tidy hundred- and thousand-year cycles beginning with the birth of Jesus Christ. Or, to be more precise, his briss, which the inventor of the Anno Domini system of reckoning, a Scythian monk named Dennis the Diminutive, calculated--surely errantly--to have taken place on Jan. 1, A.D. 1. At any rate, the history of the past thousand years shows that mass psychology--if not events themselves--tends to behave in predictable ways when...
Admission notices for the class of 2001 were mailed last month. Of the more than 2000 acceptance letters sent out, some 130 were addressed to foreign addresses --the first class of the new millennium (claims by current first-years not with-standing), like its predecessor classes, will include about six percent international students. But for a university which is a center of global excellence, and which counts diversity as one of its twin hallmarks, six percent is not a large enough number...