Word: robert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hollywood style--brash, chatty, muscular--is the only one most moviegoers know. But there is another, sparer sort, where penetrating gazes take the place of explosive technical virtuosity. It is caviar to the Hollywood popcorn, and for 40 years ROBERT BRESSON was its finest and most influential purveyor. In 13 features from Les Anges du Peche (1943) to L'Argent (1983), the Frenchman who called himself a "jolly pessimist" went his own thorny way and, through his severe, seductive example, established the dominant style of a minority art form. His films, with little dialogue and music, are in effect silent...
Meanwhile, another group of scientists--including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer--was unlocking the power of the atom in a different way, one that led to the creation of a weapon that helped win the war and define the subsequent five decades of nervous peace that ensued...
...William Shockley and his team at Bell Labs invented the transistor, which had the ability to take an electric current and translate it into on-off binary data. Thus began the digital age. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, a decade later, came up with ways to etch many transistors--eventually millions--onto tiny silicon wafers that became known as microchips...
Many people--let's not pick on Al Gore here--deserve credit for creating the Internet, which began in 1969 as a network of university computers and began to take off in 1974 when Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn published a protocol that enabled any computer on the network to transmit to any other. A companion protocol devised by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 created the World Wide Web, which simplified and popularized navigation on the Net. The idea that anyone in the world can publish information and have it instantly available to anyone else in the world created...
...with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone...