1996 Ad

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 23, 1996

Sport Utility Vehicles Once beloved by gangsta rappers and soccer moms alike, these gas hogs will lose cachet as soon as Detroit realizes that Americans really want to drive '65 Mustangs. Fins make a comeback in everybody's dreams.

Consumer Technology Society's love affair with its ability to reach out and touch someone -- anyone, anywhere, anytime via phone, fax or beeper -- finally ends. We all want a little privacy, thank you very much.

Potatoes, Pasta, Bread Those yummy carbs that have turned us into a nation of doughboys are getting a big shove to the top of the food pyramid. We want protein. We want fat. We don't really want olestra and we never wanted "Orbitz," a soft drink with balls of gelatin floating in it.

Navel Gazing Readers tire of reading about unfortunate childhoods, no matter who is the subject. Watch for Thomas Pynchon to publish his latest version of the great American novel in

The Royal Family Bad taste, bad habits and, dare we say it, bad genes. Didn't we once fight a revolution over this stuff?

Gangsta Rap Rap music still may get them going in Short Hills, but these days younger and older ears alike are being plied by an influx of recordings from jazz greats of the fifties and sixties. Bill Evans and Miles Davis ... how sweet it was. Posthumous adoration chased the vocal noodling of Dean Martin, a true swinger, while horn player Joshua Redman became the hottest thing since the Marsalis family.

Gymnastics Malnourished, maltreated and maladjusted, "Little girls dancing for gold" gave way to 6-foot-tall Amazonian goddesses elbowing each other under the net as women's probasketball took to the court.

Cigar Bars When is a cigar not a cigar? When it is being chewed to bits by a twenty something lounge lizard with more attitude than sense.

Attitude It's over. Nice guys do finish first. Manners continue to make a comeback. Whether you do it by the Good Book or Emily Post, our increasingly complex culture seeks increasingly simpler rules.

SCIENCE

The year was high-lighted by the release of a book with the gloomy title The End of Science. Its author, John Horgan, an editor at Scientific American, argues eloquently and forcefully that we live in the "twilight of the Scientific Age" and that all the great scientific discoveries lie behind us. Perhaps, but science produced more than enough headlines in 1996 to keep life interesting.

Postcards From the Edge The Hubble Space Telescope continues to amaze and confound as it peers ever more deeply into space and the universe's past. Hubble photographed a group of 18 tiny star clusters that were in the process of blending together into a galaxylike structure -- some 11 billion years ago -- the first observational evidence of galaxy formation.

Mooning Jupiter The Galileo spacecraft, its $500 million hardware crippled by a stuck main antenna, was reprogrammed in flight by its designers. Now it transmits spectacular images of the giant planet and its moons, shaking several existing theories about the Jovian system.