Word: tales
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...child with Alger and Priscilla Hiss. He calls it a "time funnel," a point of metaphysical access connecting present and past. Tony worked for years writing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker. He tells Alger's story as a kind of cold war fairy tale, colored by the moods of our age of therapy: Once upon a time, a boy's idealistic young father was set upon by an ogre who hid under the bridge, Whittaker Chambers (fat, neurotic, with bad teeth and a sick man's mysterious need to destroy), a former communist agent...
There are lots of moments to begin this tale of Chinese spying, American bungling and diplomatic trembling, but let's take the day in 1955 when Shanghai-born Qian Xuesen goes home. He had fled the Japanese occupation of China and landed at M.I.T., then earned a Ph.D. at Caltech, where he joined a rocket-research group to pioneer supersonic aerodynamics and thin-shell-stability theory for ballistic missiles. At the university's prestigious Jet Propulsion Lab, he helped design Private A, the first U.S. solid-fuel missile that worked. Then he was invited into the U.S. Army...
...male audience that it recently spawned an even more vulgar offshoot called Stuff. Stuff endorses products like Belcher soda and flaunts cover lines that leave no doubt about how far the magazine will go to capitalize on feelings of hostility men may possess toward the opposite sex--"A Grizzly Tale: 'I Saw My Wife Get Killed by a Bear...
...Seth by reporting that Rushdie had dismissed Seth's epic 1993 best seller, A Suitable Boy, as nothing but a "soap opera." Seth denied that Rushdie had been snide, but it is a measure of Seth's extraordinary skill and versatility--his first novel, The Golden Gate, was a tale of San Francisco written entirely in elegant verse; A Suitable Boy was the opposite, a marvelous, sprawling, and gripping tale of Indian family life--that one wonders if his latest book, An Equal Music (Broadway Books; 381 pages; $25), is simply his little joke. Perhaps he is saying...
...most closely followed stories of the decade; it lingers in part because of our failure to account for what happened. And we in the media are just as scared that we're to blame. By telling a violent news story, are we risking imitation? By providing a violent fairy tale, do we invite it? The biggest movie in history puts a double-bladed light saber in every child's hand or mind, and the lines between news and life and art and entertainment wind up in knots. Last week CBS dropped an especially violent show about the Mafia. "This...