Soviet-Harvard Style

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. [Brasilia] is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place; and single rather than multiple meanings. It's what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here. — Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia, (1980)

From a 1950s perspective, however, cigarettes weren't that different. The annual consumption of tobacco was approximately 12 pounds per capita, and 80 percent of men smoked cigarettes at least occasionally. Smoking was an important social practice, and, for many, a reliable way to relieve anxiety. Although the link between smoking and lung cancer was evident by the end of the decade, few people recognized that tobacco would become the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Smoking cessation seemed unnecessary and unwise, if not unfathomable. Giving up grilled, smoked and fried meats seems equally bizarre today, but population-wide changes in dietary staples have dramatically affected cancer rates in other parts of the world. (slate)