Word: transitional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...museum has joined forces with the University of Pennsylvania art department in backing a Graffiti Alternative Workshop. After "recruiting" some prolific vandals, who had been caught in the act, the workshop commissioned several at $2 an hour to candy-stripe a dilapidated transit-authority bus. The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. hired yet another group to decorate the plywood fence surrounding its new Philadelphia office. One graffitist was even paid to paint a mural on the wall of Art Patron Ben Bernstein's town house...
...similar systems in Toronto and Vancouver. George Pastor, president of Urban Transportation Development Corp.-USA, the company that is building the People Mover, claims the train will pay its own way within three years of start-up. "These systems are cheaper in capital and operating costs than traditional transit systems," Pastor insists. "When you subtract all the nonsense that occurred throughout the tragic history of this project, that will still be proved." --By Richard Stengel. Reported by William J. Mitchell/Detroit
Well, maybe. But that road to recovery threatens, at least for the moment, to cripple large segments of the U.S. economy and be extremely costly for every policyholder, taxpayer and consumer. Every day brings word of new repercussions: doctors raising their fees, playgrounds closing, swimming meets being called off, transit systems facing financial jolts, fraternities having their coverage canceled, oil-field service companies closing down. Amid all of the attendant finger pointing, a serious search is under way for some solutions...
...some cases, people are successfully pressing claims that seem patently silly. One example: a man who attempted suicide by jumping in front of a subway train sued the New York City Transit Authority, contending that the motorman of the subway that hit him had been negligently slow in bringing the train to a halt. He won $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement...
...intended to focus on America's courts. Says Nation Editor Walter Isaacson, who oversaw the project: "We were planning to look at the sweepstakes-size jury awards that were being handed out in personal-injury cases. But we kept running into horror stories about manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, peace marchers, transit systems, municipal beaches, even whole towns that were having trouble getting insurance. So we decided to concentrate on the insurance crisis and look at all the causes, including the unpredictable legal system...