Word: odd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rags-to-riches story is a perfect proxy for the way capital has snowballed down Wall Street in the past two decades--and by the way, don't expect a moral to this tale. In the 1980s Gillett was busy building a billion-dollar empire based on the odd combination of meatpacking and television stations, much of it financed by the junk bonds of Drexel Burnham Lambert, led by the now infamous Michael Milken. Drexel pumped out high-risk securities the way snowmaking machines create instant winter. Gillett, a Wisconsin boy, loved to ski, and he loved...
...brother Gianni's murder last July in Miami. In the opinion of most observers, the Milan show--as well as a show for Versace's Versus line the same week--proved the house is in capable hands, its visionary wedding of cheap sex appeal, expensive classicism and odd materials still potent. Donatella's daughter Allegra, 11, who inherited her slain uncle's share of the business, is reportedly bearing up well. At the Versus show, she enjoyed the honor of being seated front and center, right next to Victoria Adams, the Posh Spice Girl...
...Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable, [but] as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic...
...Behold the responses to the death of Mother Teresa, the birth of the McCaughey seven, the au pair trial and, most amazingly, Diana. The public reaction to the septuplets might have been the same in any era; there is always something enchanting and heartwarming about human beings' doing something odd, like producing a litter. Likewise, the loss of so demonstrably selfless a person as Mother Teresa might effect a mass response in any year...
...national melancholy seeking to express itself. The economy was way up, the deficit skinny, unemployment and interest rates down; so it would be hard to argue that melancholy was linked to money. But the fin de siecle came at the same time as the "fin" of other things. An odd loss attended winning the cold war, that of a scary enemy (the effort to inflate Saddam Hussein to that stature was seen as nonsense). There was the apparent end of ideology as the two main political parties settled on common and largely commonsensical ground. With all such monumental successes, people...