Word: suburbs
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...years ago, concerns about Y2K helped persuade Jerry and Carolyn Head to move from a suburb of Dallas to an 85-acre farm near Harrison. The Heads don't think of themselves as survivalists. "Most of them are nuts," says Jerry, 51. "We're planners," explains Carolyn, 52, a teacher who homeschools daughter Sarah, 17, and son David, 14. (Their son Lesley, 23, also lives at home.) For them, planning has meant buying a home generator, a 1,000-gal. propane tank and a small flock of chickens. The Heads expect cash to be useless for a while after...
...find a nice, affordable house, something outside of town but not too far. In Crabgrass Frontier, the essential history of suburbanization, Kenneth T. Jackson quotes a letter to the King of Persia, inscribed on a clay tablet and dated 539 B.C., that describes the pleasures of the Ur-suburb. (Literally. It was in Ur.) "Our property...is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust...
Hence the very black comedy Very Bad Things, which he has written and di-rected. In it, five thirtysomething guys from a Los Angeles suburb go off to Las Vegas for a bachelor party a week before one of them is to be married. It turns wild: a call girl accidentally gets killed, a security guard gets murdered, the boys--led by Christian Slater, doing a nice, nasty turn spouting pop-psych Nietzscheanisms--get started on a cover-up. Guilt and panic soon lead to lethal wrangles, then to variously colorful comeuppances. Meantime, Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy...
Huan Song arrived in a Chicago suburb two years ago unable to speak much English, but possessed of as much grit as a 14-year-old can muster. The child of divorced middle-class parents in China, she had been sent by her father to live with an aunt and uncle. "I could have had a comfortable life in China, but my father thought I'd have a better future and a more exciting life in the U.S. He made a great sacrifice to let me come here to have a good future...
...know that you are smart in all sorts of different ways?" Niki Mitchell is addressing her class of kindergartners on one of their first days at Coyote Creek Elementary School in Highland Ranch, Colo., a spanking-new middle-class suburb of Denver. A dozen neatly dressed five-year-olds sit on the floor in front of Mitchell as she points to a chart on the wall that lists different kinds of "smart." She describes each of them. "Maybe you like to draw pictures. That means you're picture-smart," she offers, then explains what it means to be word-smart...