Word: effective
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...illusion was designed to keep us constantly striving, adding tiny increments to the chances that our genes would get into the next generation. Yet in a modern environment--which, unlike the ancestral environment, features contraception--our obsession with material gain rarely has that effect. Besides, why should any of us choose to pursue maximum genetic proliferation--or relentless material gain, or anything else--just because that is high on the agenda of the process that designed the human mind? Natural selection, for better or worse, is our creator, but it isn't God; the impulses it implanted into our minds...
...might have been a Thousand and One Nights romance, that is, had this story not played out last week--as fully modern Middle East politics, in deadly earnest and to spectacular international effect. For the Baghdad caliphate, read Saddam Hussein's Iraq; as the fugitives' vehicles, replace camels with Land Rovers and Mercedes sedans; and, in lieu of swords, understand the fleeing armorer's specialty as ballistic missiles, warheads and lethal toxins. Whatever the reasons for it, the overland escape into Jordan by Lieut. General Hussein Kamel al-Majid, his brother and their wives--both daughters of Saddam's--resounded...
...Massachusetts state officials hoping to counter the effect of marketing ploys like "Marlboro Miles," in which consumers send collected labels in to get such popular items as CD players and hooded sweatshirts, have set up competing incentives. In April, Massachusetts tobacco-control officials persuaded 200 retailers, including McDonald's and Footlocker stores, to give discounts to teens who take a smoke-free pledge. So far, more than 25,000 children have signed up. The state has also spent $14 million on antismoking ads. Since 1994, cigarette sales to teens in the state have dropped some 40%. Said Dr. Lonnie Bristow...
...effect of double image, of not quite being in focus, mars Ursula Hegi's Salt Dancers (Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $22), a forcefully written novel of child abuse and parental desertion. The author's strength is her unfailing immediacy of language, which illuminated her fine previous novel Stones from the River. Her scenes, as character grates on troubled character, are real and vivid; they command attention. But the book's structure might have been designed by a committee to illustrate how bitter, unresolved childhood memories can be coped with. (Hegi's dedication is "For my women's group"; is there...
...first hurl. Victoria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) has reason to feel queasy: she's pregnant but unmarried and is taking a bumpy train ride home to break the news to her very traditional family, proprietors of a vast Napa Valley vineyard. Paul (Keanu Reeves, whose blankness is used to good effect) has reason to be open to any romantic possibility: it's 1945, he's just been mustered out of the army and has discovered that his hasty wartime marriage was a mistake. Besides, A Walk in the Clouds being in the magic-realist vein, a playful fate seems to want...