Word: normalization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what can you expect from the culture that brought us Hercules? In the myth Hercules was a tragic figure: born with the strength to strangle serpents in his cradle, but with far less than the normal quotient of self-control, he kills his wife Megara and their three children in an inexplicable fit of rage and is condemned to perform his superhuman feats as a way of atonement. There's a lesson here, maybe, about the disproportion between human ability--mental or muscular--and our capacity for moral reflection. But in the movie the tormented demigod becomes "Herc," an ultra...
...work, mostly, although Yardley renders this verdict gently. A normal boy growing up in Watertown, N.Y., Exley took some hits during his senior year in high school--the death of his football-hero father, an auto accident that ended his own dreams of gridiron glory--and, after majoring in English at the University of Southern California, eventually became a charming monster of self-indulgence. Women, beginning with his mother, lined up to mother him. He had two wives and physically abused them both. He drank incessantly: "There are people who knew him for years and never, to their knowledge...
...rice, corn and bean farmers in northeast Brazil, say, could, if adequately forewarned, mitigate the effect of El Nino-associated droughts by planting rapidly maturing varieties of seed. The only hitch is that if they switch and a drought does not occur, their crop yields would be lower than normal...
...workers went on strike in early August demanding higher wages and changes to the pension plan. UPS had returned to only 10 percent of its normal daily volume by using 50,000 managers and administrative employees, the company said in a statement...
...this standard, a lot of this novel is neat. But a touch of what passes for normal behavior might have set all the madness in a more convincing context. As it stands, nearly everyone in Already Dead seems, well, already dead...