Word: souped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...belief that two people together are exponentially more powerful than two people alone. "In the last 30 or 40 years, a lot of politics turned into marketing," explains Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor and community organizer who has worked with Obama. "Marketing is all about selling soup to individuals. It's not about bringing people together." Obama's model, which has made him the envy of a generation of political consultants, focuses both on selling the soup and on giving his supporters the tools to make soup together - for one another. (Watch a video about Obama paraphernalia...
...striking palette of tastes and textures has long been a hallmark of Chinese cuisine (think sweet-and-sour soup), and this affinity for taste-bud workouts has carried over to trendy drinks. The countless drink stands that line Taiwanese streets flood the thirsty soul with endless variations of bubble teas, a.k.a. hot or cold teas with chewy tapioca balls and tropical juice blends. One popular combo, green tea with passion fruit, tapioca pearls and chewy coconut cubes, helps explain why 85°C's next coffee innovations will use panna cotta and fresh fruit...
...this one affects everyone. It's hard to feel sorry for people for whom retrenchment means shifting from the private jet to commercial first class, but it does mean we're all having the same conversation, and psychologists point out we're happier when we're all in the soup together. The notion that misery loves company may be less about malice than about solace: that problems shared grow smaller, that courage is contagious. Is it just a coincidence that Mississippi, which typically ranks as the most generous state in charitable giving, is also the poorest? To suffer alone...
...Lowdown: The new year is upon us. Break out the optimism, the resolutions and the thinly-veiled self-help books. There are some, like Henry Alford's How To Live that hide their chicken-soup soul within the well-structured tale of a fruitful personal journey. Then there are those such as Rich Like Them, whose vigorous attempts to shake off the label ("It's not what you think of as a traditional self-help book...I chose instead to look at the context of these lives, to tell people's stories"), just end up making the author sound slightly...
...Lowdown: With its self-helpish title, How To Live might easily be mistaken for a book full of aphorisms and life lessons - a Chicken Soup for the Non-Elderly Soul. Thankfully, Alford is smarter than that, and his book is impressively understated in its desire to actually impart wisdom. It's more a collection of mini-profiles on fascinating senior citizens - the aforementioned Granny D., whose advanced age does nothing to lessen her spunk, the self-obsessed actress Sylvia Miles, and the simply bizarre hitchhiking, dumpster-diving Eugene Loh. The inclusion of Alford's elderly mother, who decided to divorce...