Word: waspishly
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Edward Albee almost seems to have lived through two careers, one very exciting, the other increasingly depressing. From The Zoo Story through The American Dream to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he displayed great gusto, waspish humor and feral power. In the succeeding nine years, he has foundered in murky metaphysics (Tiny Alice), dabbled in adaptations (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) and gone down experimental blind alleys (Box-Mao-Box). Instead of lunging for the jugular, as he once did, Albee has cultivated a Jamesian languor in his prose, a fastidious dandyism of manner, a dusty, librarefied...
...made suburbanites the largest group in the land, outnumbering both city dwellers and those who live in rural areas. So many Americans have already achieved the suburban goal that suburbia itself has undergone a mutation. Inevitably, the new migrants have undone the cliché image of an affluent. WASPish. Republican hotbed of wife swappers. In the suburban myth, all men are button-down commuters, swilling one martini too many in the bar car of the 5:32. Frustrated women spend their days driving from station to school to supermarket to bridge club. The kids are spoiled and confused. Families move...
Died. Eric Hodgins, 71, former managing editor and publisher of FORTUNE and vice president of Time Inc., best known for his 1946 novel, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. "I was Mr. Blandings," he later said of the book, which poked waspish fun at the trials of a New York adman constructing a country house. A journalist noted for wit and style, Hodgins also wrote Episode, an intensely personal recollection of his struggle to overcome the psychological and physical effects of a stroke that partially paralyzed...
...fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight title, it was only twenty years after the general acceptance of Queensbury rules: the sport was still developing out of its rudimentary stages, and remained a popular outlet for urban athletes from overcrowded slums. Although American championship circles were predominantly WASPish or Irish Catholic, there were many amateur clubs where local heroes could box for fun, a prize, or a small purse, and an entire corps of talented black boxers (forced to fight mainly amongst themselves due to ring economics). Sam Langford, Joe Jeannette, and Sam McVey were so good that Johnson himself wouldn...
Only in the present climate could somebody like M.M.-remember when those initials stood for someone lovely?-thrive, and the only compensation is that, by a kind of prosaic justice, the Attorney General got what he deserved: a waspish Mrs. Portnoy whose cracks can be mended only with Silly Putty. Yentas of the world, unite-you've got nothing to lose but your brains...