Word: luce
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Luce possessed a kind of clairvoyance about history, a journalist's instinct but operating in a higher orbit than journalism usually achieves. Along with Hadden, he saw that America after the Great War was in a state of change that would create a natural audience for the kind of magazine they had in mind. The nation's cultural center of gravity was shifting. A newly emergent, restless urban middle class--often intellectually and socially insecure--was getting into business, making money, buying things...
...automobile, the motion picture, the radio, Hadden and Luce detected a new consumers' appetite for motion, stimulation, variety. Traditional sources of information had become inadequate. Newspapers were local or regional and in any case offered only a patchwork of information. Magazines tended to be specialized, with a tendency toward fat and bloviation; they rarely offered news as news. None even set out to be comprehensive on a national and international scale...
Today's TIME continues to evolve, as living things do. If Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were around, they'd recognize their progeny. It would be interesting to take them aside at the 75th anniversary dinner and ask them what they think of their work in progress...
...impasto of alliterative adjectives got slathered onto public men. George Bernard Shaw was "mocking, mordant, misanthropic." General Erich von Ludendorff was "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." The intent was novelistic. As Luce explained it, "No idea exists outside a human skull--and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice--in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality. TIME journalism began by being deeply interested in people, as individuals who were making history, or a small part of it, from week to week. We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell...
Through most of an eventful and extraordinarily successful life, Henry Luce--the co-founder of TIME and its undisputed leader for nearly 40 years--was not a wholly contented man. He was unsuccessful in his marriages; intermittently estranged from members of his family; frequently dismayed by the directions in which his nation, and the world, were moving. But what most concerned him was the gap he always saw between his own actions and the high purposes against which he measured them. He achieved great power, wealth and fame, and he was by any measure one of the most influential figures...