Word: smug
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...smug. Consider that more than half the population is being left out, and if the stock market is really our ticket to retirement bliss, that must change. Individual Social Security accounts that let taxpayers direct part of their payments into stocks would be a start...
...Should I Mach Three today, or go for a barbershop shave with strop and blade? Send someone a letter, or an e-mail? Do I touch-type it up, or take out the typewriter, and probably wrangle with the ribbon far less than I'd sweat blood over a smug squat printer? But, no, it isn't just efficiency, isn't it the pre-modern satisfaction of unfamiliar physical immediacy--actually crunching out the letters, tack tack tack, not beholden to mysterious will o' wisp electrons? Why are we so far removed? Do you know how all the black boxes...
...porno film. In this documentary series, English-raised Louis Theroux (son of novelist Paul) samples the strangest fruits of freedom, from pitching infomercials to breaking bread with right-wing survivalists. This sort of participational filmmaking can become cute or self-satisfied, but Theroux maintains a curious, never smug attitude, even toward the most bizarre colonists...
...whatever its flaws--and they will, for some, include its brutal, off-putting imagery--Fight Club can't be ignored. It is working American Beauty-Susan Faludi territory, that illiberal, impious, inarticulate fringe that threatens the smug American center with an anger that cannot explain itself, can act out its frustrations only in inexplicable violence...
...arduous read that would test the syntactical skills of a tenured professor. It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years. Insufferably smug, however, Purdy is not, particularly when it comes to his anointment as an instant wise man for the millennium. "Irony," he elegantly reflects, "is probably the only appropriate response to walking by a bookstore and seeing your face in the window." There--a joke...