Word: zeitgeist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Somebody did make Fatal Attraction. And this fall, what if became wow! Striking moviegoers with the startling power of a madwoman in your bathroom, Paramount's lurid romantic thriller is the zeitgeist hit of the decade. It has been box-office champ for each of its first seven weeks in release, and shows little sign of slackening. Last week it reached the $80 million mark, to rank as the year's second highest grossing film. It's the movie with something for almost everybody. Says Michael Douglas, who plays Dan: "People leave saying 'I laughed, I got turned...
...acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence...
...battle over Bork could be the culminating ideological showdown of the Reagan era. After nearly seven years in office, the President has altered the tenor of the nation's political debate, riding and guiding the pendulum swing from the liberal Zeitgeist of the 1960s to the conservative climate of the '80s. Yet for all the talk of a Reagan Revolution, for all the President's personal popularity and success in changing tax and spending policies, the social agenda of the New Right has remained largely unfulfilled. When he nominated Bork, Reagan said that the judge "shares my view...
Deinstitutionalization fit perfectly into the antiauthoritarian zeitgeist of the '60s and early '70s. Radical Psychiatrist R.D. Laing popularized the rather romantic notion that insanity could be a sane reaction to an insane world, while Sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that institutions, by their very nature, stifled individual development. Courts began to protect the rights of the mentally ill against the encroachments of the state. But in the 1980s, the continual seesaw in America between individual freedom and society's responsibility is tipping again...
...words but lack the understanding to put what they read into broad, insightful context. The Hirsch antidote: heavy doses of Western cultural lore, as represented by a list of nearly 5,000 entries in an appendix labeled "What Literate Americans Know," ranging from A ("act of God") to Z ("Zeitgeist"), and including "1066" and "White Christmas (song)." Knowing at least a commercial idea when it sees one, namely the untrivial sales impact of the list, Houghton Mifflin promises more where it came from, i.e., a dictionary of cultural terms and perhaps an electronic game to test cultural literacy...