Word: phenomenon
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...Lovely Bones. In its bravura opening, the narrator, Susie Salmon, lucidly describes her brutal rape-murder at age 14, then goes on (telling the story from heaven) to show us the slow journey of her family and friends to recover from her loss. (This is not only a 2002 phenomenon, of course. The Sixth Sense and Crossing Over with John Edward both indulged our need to believe that our lost ones are still aware and, more important, still aware of us.) Women's nonmortal distress also got its share of attention, in two novels--The Nanny Diaries...
...come close to selling a million records) et al. were not nearly so successful as real relics such as James Taylor, Santana, Springsteen and even Elvis Presley, whose remixed A Little Less Conversation shook its pelvis up the singles charts 25 years after the King's death. This phenomenon was as much a matter of technology as psychology: with the spread of CD burning and online music piracy among kids, middle-aged folks are essentially the only people who buy music anymore...
...posture, which determines how joints align. Chronic postural misalignments cause chronic wear and tear. A hundred years ago, people stood and sat with an erect spine. Now fashion seems to favor a curved, slouched spine, which has severe health consequences. Posture is learned and is a changing cultural phenomenon. Curved posture is the source of so much misery. JEAN COUCH Palo Alto, Calif...
...bombs in Bali have placed the phenomenon of young people tasting the world at threat. I find that unbearably sad. More than 30 years ago, I discovered Europe by hitchhiking around it each summer, sleeping on beaches and in cheap hostels, breezing into Barcelona on the back of a motorbike, watching French kids in Nimes cover a table with the ripe ingredients for a perfect ratatouille, selling my blood in a clinic off Omonia Square in Athens for $8--enough for a few more days on the islands. I learned more from those trips than from years in school...
...result, public selves may become overdeveloped at the expense of our private selves. By trying to fit lives into neatly divided parts, we risk becoming little more than walking five-minute prepared statements, so polished that our exteriors become impenetrable. Many people write about the phenomenon of “rolodex-building” at Harvard: the oft-expressed sentiment that we are so concerned with our futures that we lose the raw unpredictability of the present. So often required to distill ourselves into personal statements and choreographed answers, whittled down to bare statistics, we lose our better, less articulate...