Word: manhattanization
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...then in the midst of a bitter mayoral campaign pitting three-term incumbent Edward I. Koch against a black challenger, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, came the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. He was a 16-year- old black who with a group of friends ventured into the tightly knit, mostly Italian Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn to inspect a used car. They were set upon by a gang of whites armed with baseball bats and a gun. When the melee was over, Hawkins lay dead with two bullet wounds in his chest...
...Winchell is an ex-vaudevillian who dances as he writes and lives: with little grace but an overabundance of berserk energy. He starts by posting sheets of trade tattle and pillow talk backstage at the crummy vaudeville theaters he plays. Within a decade he moves center stage, prowling Manhattan for scoops and scandal, making himself as feared and famous as the people he features in his column. Looking at dancers snuggling close one night at the Stork Club, his personal action-central, Winchell remarks, "Personally, I think it's all for show." Asks his long-suffering wife June...
Ideally, an emblematic passage would provide the unambiguous evidence of awfulness. Alther's opening three words ("An ivory BMW") and her initial description of her middle-aged, open-married Manhattan heroine ("Clea Shawn was a sophisticated woman . . . she'd been in love so often that her heart felt like a sponge mop") are certainly warning signs. So is Alther's early summary of the passions that bind two women "Elke felt like a pile of nails being pulled to pieces by a magnet residing inside Clea." But such maladroit introductory passages could be dismissed as the ironic setup...
...Give him a bar exam and he fumbles. "I'm clearly not a major legal genius," said JOHN F. KENNEDY JR., 29, last week when he got word that he'd failed New York State's bar exam for the second time. To stay on the job as a Manhattan assistant district attorney, the New York University law school graduate will have to pass the rigorous two-day test on his third try in July. Resolutely, Kennedy has vowed that he'll keep taking the exam until he passes or "until I'm 95." Whichever comes first...
...that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo...