Sublime

Highfalutin.”

indignities

meteoric

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

inert.

“They didn’t have the word teen yet,” McCracken told me, so that wasn’t how journalists mocked the largely female audience that adored these stars. “They used moronic at that time. Women were seen to have the minds of children.” (She clarified that this was originally a clinical term coming out of the eugenics movement, used to indicate that a

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy

My hair and my lips were not the only part of me that was too much. I had taken on quite a babyish voice a few years earlier, after all of the jokes about how my loudness was so “typical for a black girl”—I didn’t know what that meant, because I was the only black girl at my school, but I knew it wasn’t good. My butt was also too big,