Word: wasps
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...private Paley appears even less admirable. An inveterate social climber, he downplayed his Jewish heritage in a quest for acceptance by the Wasp upper crust. Despite two beautiful and socially accomplished wives, he chased women relentlessly. He was aloof with employees, cold to his children and lavish in his personal life-style. "Paley," says Smith, "was as spoiled as a man could...
...spate of Mob movies is that a few powerful artists want to make them. Directors love the form because its speed and anarchy spoke to them as young moviegoers. More important, it allows them to confront, in code, the awful ethnic schisms of American life; Italian vs. Wasp stands in for black vs. white. Actors love Mob movies because, now that the western is dead, the genre gives them one last chance to strut their maleness in a traditional setting. They can act like cowboys without having to ride a horse. And, as avatars of the Method, they...
...tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Wolff spears both social exculsivity and Princetonian pretension with his witty new novel, The Final Club. Wolff charts the voyage of Nathaniel Clay--a Seattle boy who is half-Jew, half WASP--from the deceptively placid waters of the 1950s, through the stormy seas of the 1960s, and finally to a shipwreck at the end of the 1970s...
Clay is not wholly anything--he is half Jewish, half Gentile. His WASP grandparents reject him completely, never having forgiven his father for marrying a Jew. He is the odd third of an otherwise perfect Preferential. His two roommates, Booth Tarkington Griggs and Pownall Hamm, are purebred patricians who breeze into the most exclusive club...
Specifically, they've determined that 33 music groups--curiously, exactly half of 66 groups--"carry negative messages within their music." Included are heavy metal bands like Slayer, Wasp, Black Sabbath and Megadeath as well as more mainstream performers such as "Led Zepplin" [sic], Guns-N-Roses, Styx, AC/DC and Van Halen. Students may no longer wear t-shirts from these bands, or write the band's name on their t-shirts or notebooks...