Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...infinitum. But only fools, or perhaps Neville Chamberlains, would succumb to the temptation to suddenly and completely change the political and military landscape without considering the possible consequences. A Reagan-Gorbachev agreement to dismantle nuclear warheads would render both of them, at least today, the greatest leaders of modern times. Tomorrow, however, they would face the uncharted and perhaps equally perilous challenges of a nuclear world without nuclear superpowers...
...Dick Button was way ahead of his time," Wylie, his modern successor, says. "He was doing triple axels before people were doing all of the double [axels]. (A triple axel, by the way, is an ice skating maneuver in which the skater jumps off a single blade and completes two and one-half revolutions in midair before landing backwards on a single blade...
...left for the University of California at Los Angeles in much the same way that Andrew Delbanco, another tremendously talented literature teacher, went to Columbia University. It is still possible, however, to allow Mr. Brinkley and Mr. Lee to continue passing along their fascination with and vast knowledge of modern American history to the undergraduates whose education is, allegedly, a high priority for the University...
Umberto Eco's novel was a deliciously complex academician's joke: a multiple- murder mystery set in the Middle Ages and starring a Sherlockian monk with the mind-set of a modern semiotician. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud's pale "palimpsest" of the novel opts instead for rolling around in the muck, blood and superstitions of primitive societies -- a sort of Quest for Friar. Annaud goes about his task with the self-satisfied air of an anthropology professor shocking the freshmen out of their complacency. His reversal of the tale's priorities dulls its point and dims the mature, intelligent presence...
Time and its offspring, movement, have fascinated some modern artists. Sculptors can build it straight into their work -- the last half of the 20th century is full of wind-, gravity- or motor-powered contraptions that range from the balletic (Alexander Calder) to the Rube Goldbergian (Jean Tinguely) -- but a painter has to deal with a still, flat surface. On it, there are two possibilities. The first is to try to render the movement of the object itself, as the futurists did with their racing cars, or the cartoonist does with his speed lines. Mostly this results in illustrations, straightforward...