Word: pop
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...Tolstoy's words, "All happy families are alike." We went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Artists who focused on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pop...
Researchers have devised other tools to look at more transient moods. Csikszentmihalyi pioneered a method of using beepers and, later, handheld computers to contact subjects at random intervals. A pop-up screen presents an array of questions: What are you doing? How much are you enjoying it? Are you alone or interacting with someone else? The method, called experience sampling, is costly, intrusive and time consuming, but it provides an excellent picture of satisfaction and engagement at a specific time during a specific activity...
...watchwords, but what she sometimes dared to take seriously were matters that educated opinion, as it emerged from the cramped quarters of the 1950s, dismissed as trivia. At a time when the barriers between high- and lowbrow were absolute, she argued for a genuine openness to the pleasures of pop culture. In "Notes on Camp," the 1964 essay that first made her name, she defined what was then a little-known set of arcane understandings--common within the gay world, not so common outside--in which trash and tinsel were venerated. Sontag could not have been more fascinated or fascinating...
...beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. In Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, dozens of men have lined up on either side of a bridge, watching for bodies trapped underwater to pop up to the surface of a lagoon. Six corpses are unloaded from a pickup truck. One of the Red Cross workers handling them complains that he has had enough; the bodies he has to handle are at this point so decomposed that their limbs have a tendency to come...
...enlightenment struck again. I saw - heard, rather - the West End show Bombay Dreams. Like Chess, it had music by a composer who had written (and sometimes performed) dozens of pop hits. Indeed, A.R. Rahman is not just India's most prominent movie songwriter - in a land of a billion people where movie music truly is popular music - but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more...