Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chief form of classical modernist painting, abstract art. A general culture glut opens the present to a limitless eclecticism and disarms taste by making everything "interesting." And, as the critic Charles Newman argues in the most provocative book on this problem yet written by an American, The Post-Modern Aura, its net effect is inflation: the permeability the past has acquired is the natural ground of hype in the present...
Kremlin scientists cannot possibly compete with their U.S. counterparts in % the race of microchips and laser beams that have increasingly become the sinews of modern warfare. The Soviets have long been able to build powerful rockets and sturdy tanks, but their home-designed computers are slow and crude. To close the gap, the Soviets have waged a massive and successful campaign to capture America's technological wizardry. Since the late '70s, estimate U.S. intelligence experts, the Soviets have made off with 30,000 pieces of high-tech equipment and 400,000 technical documents. As a result, declares Assistant Secretary...
...outmatched the Kremlin's big missiles with more accurate ones, Soviet spies were ordered by their masters to make high tech their No. 1 target. It is U.S. computer technology that the Soviets truly covet, for the ability to process masses of information in milliseconds is what makes modern weapons so deadly. Says FBI Counterintelligence Chief Ed O'Malley: "Science and technology is the KGB's largest growth industry...
Even in fiction, espionage is treated as the dirty little secret of modern international politics. James Bond is good escapist fun, but the world of John le Carre is recognized as the real thing. The bookish, perpetually cuckolded George Smiley is not a hero because he champions Western civilization; rather, he is the melancholy rationalist, penetrating the ingenuity of other people's deceit. He is more honest, and braver in his honesty, than his colleagues. Yes, he fights Karla, his Soviet counterpart, but Smiley also does battle against the corruption of his own organization and society...
...like having my client pilloried in the courtyard every Tuesday from noon to 5," protests Defense Attorney Phillip Prosch. Not quite, but his client and a dozen other offenders in Sarasota County, Fla., do indeed face a modern version of public humiliation: red stickers on their cars' rear bumpers that read CONVICTED DUI. The initials announce that the miscreants have been driving under the influence. County Judges Frederick De Furia and Becky Titus began pasting drunk drivers with the stickers two weeks ago. During the six-month period of the sentence, offenders are permitted to drive only for work purposes...