Word: suburbanitis
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Last year filmmaker R.J. Cutler and two camera crews followed 14 kids at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago, intending, he says, to make "a nonfiction My So-Called Life." A season ago, Fox would no doubt have marketed the resulting series as a teen drama. Now the catchphrase du jour is "reality TV." Trends come and trends go, but it is never a good year to sell a documentary...
...evidence of Kristensen's arachnophilia sits, silent and menacing, in thousands of plastic cups and modified deli containers in the basement of his unkempt and funky-smelling suburban house in Feasterville, Pa., just north of Philadelphia. Arrayed on tray-size boards and more than 20 6-ft.-tall racks are some 50,000 living spiders representing dozens of species: sleek, lacquered western black widows, hairy fishing spiders, palm-size Gramostola spatulata from Chile, even a fist-size, cocoa-brown African king baboon tarantula...
...races, not just Irish Americans. Most of my campers come from single parent families, many with a history of abuse and addiction. However, their behavior reveals little about their troubled backgrounds. My seven- and eight-year olds are as rambunctious and aggravating, amazing and innocent, as those from any suburban YMCA camp. Yet most of our junior counselors, teens from the community, struggle in school and have regular meetings with their probation officers...
...having dinner a month ago with a friend and her parents in suburban Maryland. They were mortified that I was going to be living in Southeast. They forbade my friend from coming down to visit my place because they feared crime. When I lived in Georgetown last summer, she was welcome to visit as much as she wanted. That a knife attack occurred on my old Georgetown block the week before I dined with them was meaningless. Further, there had been no reported crimes in my Southeast neighborhood, Eastern Market. Since then, there have been two high-profile murders...
...different and the unknown. I do not believe my friend's parents are racist or elitist. Such epithets imply a much more active hatred than I see at work in people's fears about my neighborhood and the surrounding areas. Instead, I think that my Georgetown and suburban friends fear Southeast for the same reasons that cross-racial friendships are rare. People are more comfortable with other people who are like them. Well off, white suburbanites feel more comfortable with other well off, white suburbanites. The run down buildings and the different colors of skin are unsettling to people used...