Word: alterations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bashful foreign mechanic on the sitcom Taxi whose salutation "Tenk you veddy much" became a national catchphrase. But a small cult of hard-core fans reveres Kaufman as a performance artist who upended stand-up comedy to explore his inner child. He wrestled women for laughs, created a thuggish alter ego named Tony Clifton and never let on where the prankster stopped and the real person began. When he died of cancer in 1984, at 35, even close friends suspected a hoax...
...Person of the Century? He was, after all, TIME's Man of the Half-Century in 1950. Well, the passage of time can alter our perspective. A lot has happened since 1950. It has become clear that one of the great themes of the century has been the success of those who resisted authority in order to seek civil rights, decolonization and an end to repression. Along with this came the setting of the sun on the great colonial empires...
Some have dismissed the Declaration as merely eloquent propaganda--a sort of fancy mission statement for an insurrection. The only response is to observe the power of language to alter history. Jefferson explained, "I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether... It was intended to be an expression of the American mind...
...find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial," Highsmith wrote, "for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not." But she cared for Ripley, her alter ego or attractive opposite. She attributed the first book's popularity to "the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself... I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing." In gratitude, she kept him forever young. The novels span 36 years, and each is set in the present; yet Tom ages only about a decade. He is the Dorian Gray of crime...
...conclusive, beyond further argument. In a culture ruled by King and church, where the arts were easily accused of frivolity and sensuality, this was a colossal claim. Very rarely, an artist gets to transform the conditions of his culture--not just add to them or jog their evolution, but alter them decisively. This is what Picasso did for America and Europe in the 20th century. Perhaps less obviously, Velazquez did the same for Spain in the 17th century. He showed that the nation's painting need not be provincial, that it could be open to Europe and, especially, to such...