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"Coke paraphernalia are openly displayed in 'head shops' like Washington's Pleasure Chest. The process of spreading the coke on a table in 'lines' for sniffing is as elaborate and careful as a Japanese tea ceremony. Since sniffing cocaine produces such a quick, short boost, more and more users have sought the deeper ecstatic 'rush' that comes from 'freebasing,' smoking a chemically treated form of the powder." --July 6, 1981, from a cover story on cocaine culture
REGRETS, WE HAVE A FEW As with most publications, TIME's approach to questions of ethnicity and gender wasn't always what it should have been
"Dr. Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all." --Feb. 18, 1929, from a cover story on Albert Einstein
"That a negroid nation should be menaced by spectacular Dictator Benito Mussolini highly excited the world's Negroes last week. Not only Harlem but every other darktown was on the qui vive at news from Rome that for three nights running Il Duce had sat up secretly with His Grand Council, contriving who knew what against the African Majesty of cocoa-butter-colored Haile Selassie I." --Feb. 25, 1935, coverage of Italy's threatened invasion of Ethiopia
"There is no infallible way of telling [Chinese and Japanese people] apart. Even an anthropologist, with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips, is sometimes stumped. A few rules of thumb--not always reliable...Japanese--except for wrestlers--are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. The Chinese often put on weight. The Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard-heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle." --Dec. 22, 1941, from "How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs"
"No one knows how many shirts lay wrinkling in laundry baskets last week as thousands of women across the country turned out for the first big demonstration of the Women's Liberation movement. They took over [Manhattan's Fifth Avenue], providing not only protest but some of the best sidewalk ogling in years." --Sept. 7, 1970
THE REVIEWS ARE IN Just as TIME commented on the world, so did the world comment on TIME. In some cases, depending on the source, brickbats may have been welcomed
"Prosy was the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923. Yet to suggest itself as a rational method of communication, of infuriating readers into buying the magazine, was strange inverted Timestyle. It was months before [editor Briton] Hadden's impish contempt for his readers, his impatience with the English language, crystallized into gibberish. By the end of the first year, however, Timeditors were calling people able, potent, nimble. 'Great word! Great word!' would crow Hadden, coming upon 'snaggle-toothed,' 'pig-faced.' Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the 'cozy hospitality' of Mae West. Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind." --Wolcott Gibbs, profiling Henry Luce in Timese in the New Yorker, 1936