Word: watchfulnesses
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...Chilly Night in Isfahan, Iran, 1971 As my parents unload the bags from the taxi, they tell me to sit in the hotel lobby and watch over my 2-year-old brother. I don't, not closely enough, and he waddles into the street, where he is knocked down by a truck. He's fine, if stunned. My parents assure the police that any fault lies not with the truck driver but with them, for leaving a toddler with a 5-year-old. It doesn't matter. The driver is still hauled off to prison. He is held because...
...taking any chances, this being the season of the Shah's 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian empire. Just months before, the world's royals and Presidents had flocked to Persepolis - the stone city in the desert built by King Darius and sacked by Alexander the Great - to watch costume parades of ancient Persian soldiers, down Château Lafite-Rothschild 1945 and sleep on Porthault linen in tents designed in Paris. In 1971, even a 5-year-old can feel the aggressive glamour of the Shah's regime. Nearly every shop and office has a picture...
...about parenting. And many are just about life. Bravo's Real Housewives series is still spreading across the country like Cheesecake Factory franchises. (The Salahis snuggled up to the President as candidates for The Real Housewives of D.C.) When Jon and Kate Gosselin drew 10 million viewers to watch their marriage end on TLC, reality TV proved it wasn't going into middle age quietly...
These charges are so contradictory as to cancel each other out. How, exactly, can reality TV mock its participants and celebrate them at the same time? In fact, the audience's relation to reality shows is more complicated. People don't watch Jersey Shore because they consider the Situation a role model. It's entertaining because the show is basically satire, a pumped-up spoof of bigger-is-better American culture. (Quoth Jwoww: "I see a bunch of, like, gorilla juice heads, tall, completely jacked, steroid, like multiple growth hormone - that's, like, the type I'm attracted to.") (Read...
...subjects them to ever-more-stressful challenges, to the point where it seems a competitive-eating reality show would be healthier. Sometimes it's the producers, not the viewers, who could use the reminder that it's not O.K. to do whatever it takes to win the (ratings) game. (Watch a video with Jillian Michaels "How to Lose Hundreds of Pounds...