Word: teethe
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Self-improvement has forever been an American religion, but the norms about what is normal keep changing. Many parents don't think twice about straightening their kids' crooked teeth but stop short of fixing a crooked nose, and yet, in just the past seven years, plastic surgery performed on teens has doubled. As for intellectual advantages, parents soak their babies in Mozart with dubious effect, put a toy computer in the crib, elbow their way into the best preschools to speed them on their path to Harvard. Infertile couples advertise for an egg donor in the Yale Daily News, while...
Maybe the Depression made Hollywood do it. Most of the studios were losing money by 1932 (RKO declared bankruptcy), and racy films brought in the money. But they also fanned the ire of state and local censorship boards. In 1934 the new Production Code had teeth, and under Joseph I. Breen, a former newspaperman, it bit hard. Dialogue was denatured from snappy to sappy; gowns hid what they once revealed; evil lost a lot of its seductive plausibility. And as studios sought to rerelease their pre-Code films, Breen insisted that cuts be made in the master negative, thus censoring...
...characteristics wasn't precisely what the experts expected--they were looking to see smaller, more specialized teeth and a larger braincase. So they named their hominid Australopithecus garhi (garhi means surprise in Afar). But the skull's intermediate anatomy and its age--about 2.5 million years--put it midway in both time and form between the most recent A. afarensis and the oldest known fossils of our own genus...
...cloth, wrap them in cellophane, dump them in the Mariana Trench--you could plug your ears with a Walkman and crank up a Def Leppard CD to 10--and still you'd hear the little tinny yap-yap of some office seeker promising cleaner streets, safer subways, cavity-free teeth. There was no end to the talking. It was inescapable, depressing, mind numbing. Those were the days! Now it's worse, much worse. Now they listen...
...with a novelist's touch. When Frenchman Raphael Dinelli's Algimouss capsized in a storm in the Southern Ocean, he managed to get on top of the inverted hull and cling there. The story of his rescue by his English competitor Pete Goss--who bravely turned back into the teeth of a force-10 gale and beat to windward until he located Dinelli--is one of those anecdotes of miracle that can be enacted only in an intense theater of life-or-death...