Word: overtaken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with the technological revolution of this century. We tend to trust machines more than people, allowing the former's efficiency to dwarf and overshadow the latters creativity. Sometimes we regret our decisions, like when the National Football League dropped its failed experiment with instant replay. Other times, we seem overtaken by those choices, as in a world where live operators seem to have been totally and permanently replaced by monstrous touch-tone information menus...
...current demographic trends persist, midway through the 21st century whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. Blacks will have been overtaken as the largest minority group by Hispanics. Asians and Pacific Islanders will more than double their number of 9.3 million in 1995 to 19.6 million by 2020. An explosion of interracial, interethnic and interreligious marriages will swell the ranks of children whose mere existence makes a mockery of age-old racial categories and attitudes. Since 1970, the number of multiracial children has quadrupled to more than 2 million, according to the Bureau...
...News has hit troubles on several fronts. After eight years of ratings dominance, Peter Jennings' evening newscast, World News Tonight, has been overtaken in recent weeks by the snazzier, more cleverly packaged NBC Nightly News. Creatively too, ABC's flagship newscast seems adrift, first softening the show to combat NBC, more recently retrenching a bit and trying to reassert its hard-news credentials. Good Morning America, the No. 1-rated morning show for much of the '90s, has slipped into second place, well behind NBC's Today show. Of course the network still has the indispensable Nightline, which frequently beats...
...trigger-happy response of the people speaks to one of two possible trends. The first is a national tendency toward the (melo) dramatic that has overtaken our public culture. Why believe that two men in a rented truck are going about their business if you can instead imagine that they are dangerous terrorists on a secret mission to destroy American society and that you are the savvy by-stander who saw the truth and averted national disaster...
...second, more disturbing issue is a pervasive sense of fear that has overtaken our everyday lives. In the wake of national tragedies and terrorist scares, it no longer seems unreasonable to see terrorists lurking inside every U-Haul truck. The most lasting legacy of the Oklahoma bombing and last summer's TWA explosion over the New York skyline is a deep feeling of vulnerability and a heightened desire for caution. In this environment, every suspicious person is a threat and every credible threat must be dealt with seriously...