Word: popular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like a rural electric network, illuminating lives house by house. In Fujian province each spring, tens of thousands of the faithful parade from town to town in religious "long marches" celebrating localized Taoist gods. Tai Shan, a holy mountain south of Beijing, is one of the country's most popular tourist sites--especially among would-be grandmothers, who trudge to the top, drape red strings over trees and then return home to wait for the grandson this ritual is supposed to guarantee. The searching need for faith is written on the faces of the Chinese who pace each...
Except story is not the end of this movie. It's a beginning, a pretext, for what is, finally, a brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism. The film has the bleached look of a carelessly shot videotape, with, occasionally, what Russell calls "very intense hits of color"--a Bart Simpson doll is one of them--burning through its low-contrast surface. This is how combat appears to us in the new technological age--no terrible beauty, just absurdity's flat, deadly record keeping...
Zackheim will be adding, however, to the popular re-evaluation of Einstein that is slowly catching up with the scholarly revelations. Knowing Lieserl's fate, of course, doesn't make much difference when it comes to Einstein's science. But, like Zackheim, most people are slowly discovering that Einstein was not simply the secular saint they grew up with--the aureole-haired, sock-shunning professor who solved geometry problems for little girls, alerted F.D.R. to the German A-bomb peril and then wept over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Stiffed is a brilliant, important book. Unlike Backlash, which felt at times like a compendium of statistics and a sweeping survey of popular culture, here Faludi's reportorial and literary skills unfold with a breathtaking confidence and beauty. These men talk to her as they have probably never talked in their lives before, and the rich and intricate tapestry she weaves from their stories is enough to make one rethink our entire Western value system. When she describes the family spirit and pride in their work of the men at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, shut down by the government...
...TRADE YOU Last week a group of parents sued video-game maker Nintendo Co. and others, claiming that the popular Pokemon cards promote illegal gambling. Some kids have become obsessed with trading the cards, which contain images of monsters with names such as Wartortle and Blastoise. The suit states that Nintendo issues relatively few "premium" cards, thus forcing kids to buy many packets in hopes of securing them. Rare cards have sold for $50, and fights have broken out over them. Nintendo has declined to comment on the case...