Word: plasticity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...membership had its privileges. For as little as $55 a year, consumers could twinkle in fellowship with such glitterati as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ella Fitzgerald and Meryl Streep. All one had to do was wave one's little piece of green, gold or platinum plastic, and waiters and clerks would fawn prettily. Such potent snob appeal once seemed irresistible -- until American Express "cardmembers" began weighing the costs of privilege against the benefits of more plebeian credit cards. While the AmEx elite shelled out annual fees, Discover clients were issued free cards. Amex users had to pay their bills in full each...
...gift of life is never meant to be returned, especially not wrapped in plastic, packed in ice and enclosed in a small Igloo cooler. But that is precisely the transaction that occurred last week at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where doctors took the heart of a 22-year-old who died following a car crash and sewed it inside the body of her father...
...Virginia health authorities and to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The Reston building was, in Army parlance, a "hot zone," an area that contained lethal, infectious organisms. An Army team, wearing space suits, killed the 450 surviving monkeys by lethal injection, and the cadavers were place in plastic bags for disposal. Before the building was boarded up, the Army sterilized every square inch of the interior. Dcotors monitored employees and Army ( personnel who had been exposed to monkey blood. Eventually it became appparent that the Ebola Zaire strain at Reston was harmless to humans. Yet the virus...
...this another case of ballot hijacking by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the P.R.I.? Finally, Caralampio Amparo Perez, an election official, emerged waving one of his replacement boxes over his head. He had improvised with cookie cartons; each had a hole cut into the side and covered with a plastic bag to create a makeshift window. The voters nodded, and by day's end they and the country had elected Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon Mexico's next President...
...Florida in Miami, kingdom of dollars, citadel of wealth unimaginable, the exiles have a favorite T shirt: it portrays the Malecon after Castro's fall as an endless vista of shiny, neon-lighted fast-food joints. The crumbling, once graceful seafront is still a long way from that plastic vision. Potuombo gestures at the crowd in his cafe, who are placidly consuming not Whoppers or Big Macs but the tepid brown soda that is the sole item on his depleted menu. "These are the real Cubans," he proclaims. "These are the people who will defend the revolution despite the limitations...