Word: moderners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...modern rock bands of today, I hope you all have been paying close attention to this concert and this band, because raw rock talent like R.E.M. comes around once in a millennium. They haven't resorted to exhortations of violence or kitschy and cutesy covers or amalgamations of genres to survive. Blink and you'll miss most rock music, but R.E.M. and their rapid eye movement have perfected the skill of slowing down to remember the past even while hurtling forward into the future...
...system: issue-driven and intellectually inviting. The debate over reform has advanced beyond Ross Perot's jug-eared, wild-eyed peek under the hood; it has also advanced beyond ? or, rather, never really included ? Buchanan's willful, calculated ignorance of the rules of economic and political success in the modern world. We are up to specifics, up to intra-system mavericks like Bradley and McCain pressing real plans for campaign finance reform, and beyond pitch-perfect radicals like Pat Buchanan, who play to the angriest elements of our electorate because they reliably come out and vote...
...program's founder, Smith Professor of Law Henry J. Steiner, said the organization was created to incorporate the lingua franca of the human rights movement into the framework of the modern-day legal education...
Purdy's mind, however, is another matter. With the publication of his first book--For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (Knopf; 256 pages; $20)--the brainy nature boy has stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness. Reduced to simple headlines, Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letter- man. "The ironic individual," he writes, "is a bit like Seinfeld without a script; at ease in banter, versed...
Purdy doesn't wish to be a spoilsport. He's negative only about negativity. Temperamentally, he's an optimist who places his faith in action, not attitude. One issue close to his tender rural heart is the preservation of West Virginia wilderness from the mountain-leveling predations of modern coal mining. A student of law and forestry at Yale, he sees himself arguing his causes in court someday, but his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism. "We need today a kind of thought and action that is too little contemplated yet remains possible...