Word: sprawl
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Simmering Suburbs. Four out of 5 Americans live in what the Census Bureau calls metropolitan areas. But this catch-all term can be misleading because such areas typically include the outlying sprawl that surrounds urban centers; moreover, many communities that call themselves cities actually have the character of suburbs...
Remember the network mini-series? It used to roam the TV plains: a big, lumbering beast that would show up two or three times a year, sprawl across nights and nights of prime time and attract (at least sometimes) hordes of viewers. Mounting costs and sagging ratings have pretty much forced the networks to abandon these extravaganzas. Instead, we get tidy two-parters, most of them either tacky soap operas (Danielle Steel's Kaleidoscope and Fine Things) or sensationalistic true-life crime stories (Love, Lies and Murder...
...thing that tends to separate the girls from the boys. "Women tell stories," she says. "Men do one, two, three, bop." The new funnywomen are anything but rote jokesters: like Robin Williams or Billy Crystal,they invent routines as they go along. Paula Poundstone, whose stand-up is a sprawl across a stool, ad-libs about 30% every night. When she was too broke to redeem her outfits from the dry cleaner's, she included the angst in her monologue: "It's like, the clothes are in jail. I go in every so often and say, 'Could I just...
...still not fully electrified; all trains must switch locomotives in New Haven, Conn. The U.S. needs a renewed political and financial commitment to making train travel rapid and economical. Developing a new generation of high-speed trains will be awfully expensive (especially building rail lines through the suburban sprawl of the Northeast Corridor), but the energy shortage will require it sooner or later. And the longer we wait, the worse the obstacles become...
Dawn in Ojai, Calif. As the sun rises over rugged peaks, more than 80 young men and women are busy shoveling horse droppings at the elite Thacher School, a 425-acre sprawl of corrals and classrooms that combines New England-style prep-school life with the ethos of Western ranching. As part of their regimen, students must feed the horses and muck out their stalls before breakfast. Some students grumble about the early-morning chores, but most of them ultimately embrace the school's central belief that a connection exists between caring for a horse and conquering calculus. "Before...