Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...make friends." With this handy advice from Pappa, I headed off from a small town in Mississippi to the wild and woolly world of collegiate schooling. Of course, Pappa and I had different conceptions of what Harvard College was all about. To me, Harvard was principally highbrow conversations, a way to impress people at cocktail parties, and, most of all, a ticket out of the boondocks, where strict Baptist morality posed considerable obstacles to my social education...
After that, I stayed out of the room. I auditioned in vain for plays, trying to regain the cameraderie of my old theater group. But I got rejected again and again, and I finally took refuge in libraries, trying to study my way out of my depression and loneliness. In this morass, I clung to the one human and intellectual contact of that first semester: a freshman seminar on China taught by a man who honestly cared not only about our intellectual development, but also about our personal adjustments to Harvard...
...greatest contribution to civilization in this century may well be air conditioning-and America leads the way." So wrote British Scholar-Politician S.F. Markham 32 years ago when a modern cooling system was still an exotic luxury. In a century that has yielded such treasures as the electric knife, spray-on deodorant and disposable diapers, anybody might question whether air conditioning is the supreme gift. There is not a whiff of doubt, however, that America is far out front in its use. As a matter of lopsided fact, the U.S. today, with a mere 5% of the population, consumes...
Everybody by now is aware that the cost of the American way is enormous, that air conditioning is an energy glutton. It uses some 9% of all electricity produced. Such an extravagance merely to provide comfort is peculiarly American and strikingly at odds with all the recent rhetoric about national sacrifice in a period of menacing energy shortages. Other modern industrial nations such as Japan, Germany and France have managed all along to thrive with mere fractions of the man-made coolness used in the U.S., and precious little of that in private dwellings. Here, so profligate...
...boxy, sealed-in skyscrapers on which the once humane geometries of places like San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan have been impaled. It has been indispensable, no less, to the functioning of sensitive advanced computers, whose high operating temperatures require that they be constantly cooled. Thus, in a very real way, air conditioning has made possible the ascendancy of computerized civilization. Its cooling protection has given rise not only to moon landings, space shuttles and Skylabs but to the depersonalized punch-cardification of society that regularly gets people hot under the collar even in swelter-proof environments. It has also reshaped...