Word: modern
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...Though the irony-sporting, status quo-abhorring, plaid-clad denizens of Williamsburg are a distinctly modern species, the hipster as a genus has its roots in the 1930s and '40s. The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. The word's origins are disputed - some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others think it comes from the West African word hipi, meaning to open one's eyes. But gradually it morphed into a noun, and the "hipster" was born...
...growing group of psychologists believes that many of our modern-day mental problems, including depression, stress and anxiety, can be traced in part to society's increasing alienation from nature. The solution? Get outside and enjoy it. (See the top 10 odd environmental ideas...
...splenetic man, contemptuous of both authority and the human herd, always feuding with the world and licking his wounds, he ended up all the same with money, royal honors and a secure if peculiar foothold in art history. There's a major Ensor show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this summer. It focuses just on work from the two decades after 1880, when he was in his 20s and 30s, but, no surprise, those were the years we love him for, when Ensor got deeply in touch with his inner oddball...
...founded an alliance of Belgian avant-gardists. Les Vingt - the Twenty - held an annual salon of its own that solicited work from foreign artists including Monet, Renoir and Whistler. In 1887, Georges Seurat contributed nothing less than A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a tour de force of early modern art. Properly dazzled, a good number of the Twenty became converts to Seurat's pointillism. This was too much for Ensor. He had already dismissed the Impressionists. Who cared about capturing fugitive sunlight when you could be trying to pin down hellfire? Seurat's shimmering neo-Impressionism looked no better...
Before long, however, population growth was taking a toll on the nation's food supply. In 1955 officials launched a campaign to promote birth control, only to have their efforts reversed in 1958 by the Great Leap Forward - Mao's disastrous attempt to rapidly convert China into a modern industrialized state. "A larger population means greater manpower," reasoned Hu Yaobang, secretary of the Communist Youth League, at a national conference of youth work representatives that April. "The force of 600 million liberated people is tens of thousands of times stronger than a nuclear explosion...