Word: pastness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Self-improvement has forever been an American religion, but the norms about what is normal keep changing. Many parents don't think twice about straightening their kids' crooked teeth but stop short of fixing a crooked nose, and yet, in just the past seven years, plastic surgery performed on teens has doubled. As for intellectual advantages, parents soak their babies in Mozart with dubious effect, put a toy computer in the crib, elbow their way into the best preschools to speed them on their path to Harvard. Infertile couples advertise for an egg donor in the Yale Daily News, while...
Keith Alexander, who works out of a New York City shop that bills itself as "the world's largest fetish emporium," estimates he's seared more than 150 skin signs over the past five years. "People need memorable symbols when they pass from one stage of life to another," he says. "Some get a brand at the end of a divorce, others on their birthday." Many of his clients are punk rockers and S&M aficionados. About half, he says, are fraternity members, including African-American frats that have used branding for years, sometimes choosing slave designs to connect with...
Even branding is tame compared with more extreme bod-mod, ranging from people who have their tongues split to some Star Trek fanatics who have supposedly tried to look like a Klingon. Then there's Erik Sprague, 27, of Albany, N.Y., who has spent the past several years trying to turn himself into a lizard. So far he has had Teflon implants to enlarge his forehead and filed his teeth into fangs, while covering his body with tattoos of reptilian scales...
...remain in "Stiltsville," an eccentric collection of homes standing like flamingoes in the shoals seven miles off the coast. In Al Capone's day, the community doubled as an aquatic red-light district. Bygone booze-and-broads joints like Pierre's Bikini Club are etched in Miami's nefarious past. But today Laura, 35, and her husband Jeff, 36, use her family's stilt house as a weekend retreat, an octopus' garden where their children can angle for bonefish from the balcony and squeal at dolphins that come by like neighborhood gossips. "Some of us," says Laura, "still want...
Malaak leads you up the stairs, past three framed posters of Miles Davis, past a shelf containing pictures of Rock's family and copies of books like Dorothy West's The Wedding, into the kitchen, where Rock, dressed in a Phat Farm T shirt, sweat pants and white gym socks, is watching the world track-and-field championships on TV and flipping through the sports section of the Daily News. Some of Rock's friends suggest that the couple have experienced domestic difficulties of late, but right now they look comfortable together; relaxed, laid back. Still, there's a little...