Word: searchings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worth hanging on to. The evidence suggests that all this change is making Americans more conservative, not so much politically as psychically, sending them back to church or into bookstores looking for volumes about how to live an authentic life--making them garden and recycle and learn yoga and search for steadiness and security and a little peace...
...gazebos and town squares and the transplanted totems of an easier age. The deep American nostalgia for rural life may owe more to fantasy than memory, but it is a theme that has grown more powerful as the pace of change picks up. At a time when the search for Real Life is becoming a marketing tool, when Coors promotes itself as the Last Real Beer and cotton is the Fabric of Our Lives, a lot of towns are realizing themselves, deciding it is easier to restore an evocative Main Street than to build one from scratch...
Eight years ago, Peabody, Kans., had a 30% vacancy rate downtown. Young people fled after high school in search of jobs, the tax base shrank, businesses left, and people had to drive to the next town to buy shoes. An entire building on Main Street sold in 1985 for $425. So town leaders put window shades in the upper stories of all the buildings on Main Street to make it look as if someone lived there, and began marketing the town to tourists and entrepreneurs and a wave of urban refugees...
Thus ended the search for one of the most notorious accused terrorists in the world. On Jan. 25, 1993, during the morning rush hour, a lone gunman pulled out an AK-47 and opened fire on commuters outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., killing two CIA employees and wounding three other people. Kansi, whose prints were allegedly found on the spent shell casings, was identified as the prime suspect. However, the day after the shooting, he left the U.S. on a one-way ticket to Karachi. Soon he made his way to Quetta, Pakistan, capital of the province of Baluchistan...
Despite the Americanization of this part of the world--which, in truth, I expected from the start--by the time I leave here in eight weeks, I think I will have gained what I left in search of. In the U.S., I said I wanted to get away to see things differently, to break out of the mold, to feel refreshed for a return to Harvard in the fall. Now, 5,000 miles away, it is clear to me that what I was really looking for was a way to more fully come home...