Word: short
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mental patients' living in the streets has grown to include the working poor and whole families. Nearly a quarter of the homeless have jobs; more than a third are families with children. "The growing phenomenon of homeless children," says a report from the National Academy of Sciences, "is nothing short of a national disgrace...
Down on the pebbly beach, where small waves skip in one after another, the fence stops short of the water. Its concrete foundations have been laid bare by erosion; on one concrete post someone has written SIN FRONTERAS (without borders). Whether a plea or a demand, the slogan seems more appropriately a dream. Rich man, poor man, Anglo and Hispanic. They might well rub shoulders along this frontier, but they are still set apart by more than just a river, a fence or a line of marker posts...
...that intellect is not just a target but a magnet, a fascination even in a culture more preoccupied with stadium bruisers and nymphets. At 55, she has been one of the most visible intellectual figures in American life for more than two decades. In two novels, a collection of short stories and five volumes of essays, Sontag has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience. In private, she can be funny and informal, tilting her head sideways when she laughs, so that the band...
...have met a mixed reception, and not just in Bull Durham. Though she builds an absorbing puzzle in The Benefactor (1963), in parts of Death Kit (1967) the scientific instrument of her prose is never quite equal to a musical instrument of the imagination. But in her more recent short stories, many of them collected in I, etcetera (1978), she triumphs, neatly drawing thought into the shapes of feeling. At the end of the story Debriefing, about the psychic perils of city life, she even makes what could be a gently funny summation of her own doggedness...
...quit smoking two years ago, but there's still one more essay she plans to turn out, this one about intellectuals and Communism, taking as its point of departure the disillusioning trip that the writer Andre Gide made to the Soviet Union in 1936. And then there's a short book on Japan. And then . . . Well, at least the tube won't be distracting her. The houseguest has departed, and the men have come to retrieve the rented TV. "I did watch a bit of it," she admits. "But I couldn't watch much. The thing about television...