Word: 1920s
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...coincidentally, by the late 1920s German publications were leaders in that pursuit. The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, or BIZ, boosted circulation to 2 million with a new journalistic form, the photo story. Under editor Kurt Korff and publishing director Kurt Safranski, anywhere from two to five pages of BIZ, heavily dappled with photos, were devoted to a single topic: the daily routine at a Trappist monastery, the drama of a parachute jump. BIZ, London's Picture Post (edited by Stefan Lorant) and the elegant French magazine Vu drew upon a breed of independent artist-photographer, often with one foot in Bohemia...
This century saw ivory become a raw material for industry. In the 1920s thousands of elephants were butchered to meet U.S. demands for 60,000 ivory billiard balls a year and for hundreds of thousands of piano keys. In the 1970s ivory was a hedge against inflation, stockpiled and traded like bullion...
When Bertolt Brecht created his legendary Mahagonny, that "City of Nets" where every pleasure is for sale, he neglected to specify exactly where it was. It was originally thought to be the Nazi-threatened Berlin of the 1920s, but the libretto that he wrote for Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could...
What gave him that idea was Kafka's Amerika. "I was thinking about how he and Brecht and others saw America. Obviously, they got their ideas from the movies, the Keystone Kops, Chaplin. You think of these guys sitting in poky little movie houses in Central Europe in the 1920s watching these flickering images. As far as they were concerned, everything in America was all in the same place. You rode down Fifth Avenue straight into Monument Valley...
Throughout history, would-be pioneers and developers have discovered just how unreceptive the Amazon can be. Henry Ford tried twice to carve rubber empires out of the rain forest in the 1920s and '30s. But when the protective canopy was cut down, the rubber trees withered under the assault of sun, rain and pests. In 1967 Daniel Ludwig, an American billionaire, launched a rashly ambitious project to clear 2.5 million acres of forest and plant Gmelina trees for their timber. He figured that the imported species would not be susceptible to Brazil's pests. Ludwig was wrong...