Word: suburban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...face of such horror -- not to mention the apparent suicide of the young gunmen -- few have the heart to trace the blame to the homes that produced the killers. Doubtless too many parents can see themselves in that position to confront the uncomfortable, unfamiliar reality of suburban teenage anomie. In a country where burning yourself with a very hot cup of coffee is considered grounds for a lawsuit, the temptation to place the blame on someone -- anyone -- else is apparently irresistible, especially in the face of such an unconscionable...
...second postwar phenomenon that may contribute to this American trend is suburbia -- mass shootings by high schoolers appear to be confined to mostly white, suburban schools, rather than the inner city communities more commonly plagued by gun violence. "Violence in minority neighborhoods and schools tends to be gang- and drug-related," says TIME correspondent Elaine Rivera. "In suburbia, though, it appears to be influenced by intense alienation and isolation, combined with easy access to guns and a culture that teaches kids, in everything from movies to foreign policy, that violence is a valid means of resolving problems." The isolation...
William Butler Yeats feared a world in which "the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Yeats would see it as tragic that pit-dwellers feel their suburban angst more passionately than Harvard students feel touched by art or philosophy. We can yet disprove Yeats' fears, so long as we remember that intellectual rigor and our desire for mastery in dealings with others need not preclude a healthy sense of intensity, longing, curiosity and wonder...
Looking chunky and suburban, yet glowing with hope, Winslet is the opposite of her Titanic character. There she grasped heedlessly at her destiny; here her reach is more tentative, her manner more reactive than active. There's bravery in that acting choice, and in the refusal of director Gillies MacKinnon, working from a script adapted by his brother Billy of a novel by Esther Freud, either to romanticize or trash the hippie past. They permit us to see it for what it was--another silly, doomed, very human attempt to evade responsibility's inescapable embrace...
Aside from the suburban teenager as represented by James Van Der Beek, is there a subject of greater cultural fascination at the moment than the young, single career woman yearning to a Joni Mitchell ballad in her mind? She has certainly claimed her place on television, and soon Barnes and Noble will need to create extra room for her, perhaps with a books-about-thirtyish-media- women-who-fret-and-drink-Scotch-in-New-York-or-California section. In the year since Helen Fielding's best-selling Bridget Jones's Diary, a novel focused on a cocktails-and-cellulite-obsessed...