Word: urbane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Furthermore, to assume that Black leaders are the only sources of racial harmony in urban areas completely simplifies the problem of bigotry. The Times' argument is claiming that the only reason why Watts doesn't burn again is because "they've got one of their own in the statehouse...
...extreme conservative view is that support of the contemporary arts is not the business of government. Never mind that quite a few people who were not exactly radicals, from Rameses II to Louis XIV and Pope Urban VIII, thought otherwise and thus endowed the world with parts of the Egypt, the Paris and the Rome we have today. New culture is optional -- slippery stuff, ambiguous in its meanings, uncertain in its returns. Away with it! Let the corporations underwrite...
Billed as a "guide to the books everyone talks about and some people even read," Spy Notes satirizes hip, urban novels. A chapter synopsis of a Tama Janowitz novel: "Eleanor goes to Wilfredo's apartment for a dinner party. The couples are all men. The reader understands that Wilfredo is homosexual. Eleanor does not. This is called dramatic irony...
Whyte also claims that gentrification, one of the symbols of renewed urban vitality, is not the social evil for displaced people it has been made out to be. The real culprit, he contends, is the government decision not to build more housing. "People think you have a nice Italian family, and then you have these peace-eating liberals who push them out. Well, that's not the way it works," Whyte argues. "By and large, many steps have been taking place before the so-called gentrifiers move in. They do not buy from the nice ethnic family and kick them...
Whyte is noticeably quiet about the crime, dirt, awful schools and general corrosiveness that drive people out of cities in the first place. One urban expert says Whyte romanticizes a city that no longer exists -- "the city E.B. White wrote about in 1946, where you could leave the Stork Club at 2 a.m. and take the subway home." Whyte concedes that he has no plan to solve the litany of urban problems, but he denies he is a dreamer. "I am an anti-Utopian," he says. "We've got a lot of problems in New York that are not going...