Word: trivia
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Anybody who believes that U.S. schools are teaching too much trivia can get inspiration and support from Historian Arthur E. Bestor of the University of Illinois, who is a sort of self-appointed conscience of U.S. education. Professor Bestor stirred up angry storms of controversy with his Educational Wastelands (TIME. Nov. 16, 1953), an extensive, documented attack on the "narrow group of specialists in pedagogy" who, Bestor claims, control U.S. schools. Those who thought that Wastelands was his final word of denunciation did not reckon on Bestor's persistency-or his thoroughness...
Analyst Jones never manages to explain fully Freud's peculiar hostility toward the U.S. He lists trivia, such as 53-year-old Freud's oversensitiveness (surely immature) when a guide in Niagara's Cave of the Winds called: "Let the old fellow go first." And he notes that Freud unfairly blamed rich U.S. food for intestinal trouble that actually antedated his visit by several years, and was probably a psychosomatic remnant of his earlier neurosis. "I often said to myself," Freud once wrote, "that whoever is not master of his Konrad should not set out on travels...
...Trash & Trivia." But the formula got out of hand. The biggest spur was economic. With little newsprint available, the popular press used what space it had to the best advantage, i.e., to lure readers. Since advertisers had to wait in line to get into the tightly rationed dailies, editors knew that the only way to boost revenue was to boost circulation...
...circulation of only slightly over a million. Observed New York Herald Tribune Columnist Roscoe Drummond, visiting in London last week: "We Americans often think the British press neglects America . . . Most British mass circulation newspapers neglect what is important about Britain [in] a sensational, restless hodgepodge of trash and trivia...
...room, and when he did, he was often followed by his German shepherd dogs. From his huge, marble-topped desk in the Trib's Gothic tower, he bombarded his staff with memos signed "RRMcC." They ranged over thousands of subjects, from international political skulduggery to the most nonsensical trivia. "Everyone should be interested to know how hard a lobster pinches," the Colonel once scribbled. "Crabs, clams, oysters. This information should be easy to get. I suppose...