Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Advice for the modern teen idol: there's more to it than just cashing royalty checks and autographing training bras. There are difficult issues that must be faced. For instance, some toy company may want to measure your face so that it can manufacture dolls with your likeness. You could make a lot of money selling them to your youngest fans, but then your older fans--the 12- and 13-year-olds--would think you're babyish and move on to Hanson. And then there's all the choreography you have to remember while you're trying to look...
...winning kids over to become fans of homework may take more than high-tech help. Annette Bitter's seventh-graders love doing research on the laptops they got through a Microsoft study. "But of course there are always excuses," says Bitter, who keeps hearing a modern tale of woe: "The computer ate my homework...
...seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." It was an odd choice, and the software magnate may have missed its tragic import. In the end of the novel, Jay Gatsby does fail to grasp his dream, and success destroys him. The two Bills are already modern Gatsbys of a sort, having achieved their very different versions of the American Dream. Whether their flaws, like the original Gatsby's, pull them down remains to be seen...
...attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers...
...touchstone image: the modern elevator, that everyday mechanical wonder whose promise is to open up the sky, to loft human beings equally into the heavens. Without the elevator, space is scarce, the boundaries of the city grimly fixed. With it, there's hope of a place for everyone...