Word: moderners
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...cafeteria, where a crowd of Vikings drowns out the rest of conversation by repeatedly singing the name of the unpopular processed meat - the first unsolicited messages came over the wires as early as 1864, when telegraph lines were used to send dubious investment offers to wealthy Americans. The first modern spam was sent on ARPANET, the military computer network that preceded the Internet. In 1978, a man named Gary Turk sent an e-mail solicitation to 400 people, advertising his line of new computers. (Turk later said his methods proved so unpopular that it would be more than a decade...
...haven't. Buying eggs from a factory farm: a GDP boost. Raising chickens in your backyard: nope. Forty years ago, buying a VCR to watch a movie at home would have been a significant contribution. Today, picking up a DVD player adds almost nothing. But doesn't the more modern machine provide the better picture...
...Modern media did not invent greed, eccentricity or lust for attention. What they did was monetize them. There have long been odd families and obscure men pursuing bizarre theories and cobbling together flying machines in their backyards. But only in the reality-TV era has unstable behavior become a valid career choice. Only now are questionable parenting decisions the stuff of a lucrative family business. Say whatever you want about Jon and Kate Gosselin, their divorce proceedings entail numbers with a lot more zeroes than your typical young Pennsylvania family encounters...
...also the story of the destructive arrival of the modern age in Europe. The armies that rolled through Normandy obliterated an ancient land and way of life that would be rebuilt but never restored. At one point, Beevor describes the astonishment of an old Benedictine nun emerging from her convent during the evacuation of Caen: she had never seen a truck before. It took a world war to chivy out the last vestiges of the 19th century from where they still lived, peacefully sequestered in the bocage, and expunge them forever. The Germans and the Allies would eventually leave Normandy...
Bruce Wasserstein, who died Oct. 14 at 61, was one of the giants of modern investment banking. Beginning in the early 1980s, Wasserstein's dealmaking acumen turned mergers and acquisitions, then a rarity, into a powerful tool of corporate strategy...