Word: phenomenon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...unlikely to draw research resources away from the more pressing search for a vaccine and a cure. But just as we're not satisfied with perennially checking the "don't know" box in explaining an air crash, we're burdened, as a culture, to find an explanation for a phenomenon that has killed 16 million people - and has infected 33 million more - in less than two decades. "The interesting thing is that in Hooper's explanation, as in all the plausible scenarios for how the virus made the jump to humans, the key element is a chance encounter," says Gorman...
...downsizing of new year's Eve is a logical reaction to that conspicuous, late-second-millennium phenomenon: runaway hype. We've seen years of countdowns, retrospectives and magazine special issues. One entrepreneur went as far as to trademark and license the date 01-01-00 for New Year's gewgaws. No sooner did the milestone begin looming than advertisers began trying to persuade us to, say, associate the Roman numeral 2000--MM--with a certain candy-coated chocolate. Even the Y2K problem has morphed from potential cataclysm to commercial punch line: a Nike ad shows a man going...
...roast. But across the country and the world, people are finding as many reasons to stay in this New Year's Eve as to go out. Most boil down to one thing: other people. With no basis in nature, the passage of a thousand years is a man-made phenomenon, and so are its attendant worries. The question of how you mark this millennium is partly a question of faith--not religious faith so much as faith in humankind. Faith that people can throng by the hundreds of thousands in the world's metropolises without havoc. Faith that...
...this universal phenomenon is being celebrated in two separate showcases. Last week a cross-cultural exhibition titled "Body Art: Marks of Identity," curated by Schildkrout and devoted to the past 4,000 years of body modification--"bod-mod" to the cognoscenti--opened at the American Museum. At the same time, photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, based in London, have published African Ceremonies (Abrams; $150), two magnificent volumes documenting the continent's rapidly vanishing kaleidoscope of tribal rites, many of which involve elaborate body decoration...
...cultural phenomenon has been more studied and worried over than the effect of television on children. Parents wring their hands over content. Media watchdogs make careers launching competing studies. But while the grownups present position papers, guess what the kids are doing? They're alone in their bedroom, watching television. According to a major study measuring the media consumption of 3,000 kids, ages two to 18, released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the typical American kid spends about 5 1/2 hours a day "consuming" media (computers and music, but mainly TV) at home. For kids eight...