Word: social
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated...
...career. What was I to do? Start selling lighting fixtures and hope to rise in the corporation?" Instead, he wrote The Sporting Club, an apocalyptic satire of an exclusive Michigan hunt club, which was published in 1969 to rave reviews. Two years later came The Bushwacked Piano, a biting social broadside about a scheme to sell towers stocked with insect-eating bats to the gullible public. In 1973 McGuane upped the ante with Ninety-Two in the Shade, a dazzling novel of free- floating angst and male brinkmanship set in the Florida Keys. Ninety-Two was nominated for a National...
...well-heeled thieves. Moments later the story shifts to the office (coyly labeled a "cell") where his creator labors as a hireling of a movie tycoon more crass, smug and fascinatingly awful than any envisioned by Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward, as if a film were being rewound, until they are back in position to perform...
Substitute Social Security checks and Christmas cards for fudge caramels, imagine 150,000 annual grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions instead of firing, and a picture of the modernized Postal Service emerges. Officials downplay the problems but admit that the new pace is hard on older clerks accustomed to stuffing mail into pigeonholes. Yet the old-fashioned postalworker represented by two powerful unions is going to have to adjust. "We've got to capture the savings dollar-for-dollar that these machines represent, or we can kiss the Postal Service as we know it goodbye," says Robert Setrakian, chairman...
...Russian nationalists who hanker after the Czarist past, many of them aligned with the reactionary Pamyat (Memory) movement. Whatever their ideological differences, the conservatives are united by a concern that the reforms are moving too fast and bringing in alien Western ideas that are pushing the country toward a social breakdown...