The “Irony of Fate” sounds like some of the critics’ complaints about Levittown when it first opened: The houses are the same, the people are the same… Read Halberstam’s “The Fifties” for a more nuanced look.
I’ve never seen Friends, but I spent hours watching the movie on videotape at Middlebury. It was immensely satisfying to watch it on Russian TV that New Year’s Eve. I turned to a classmate who was watching it with me and said “I can understand everything they’re saying!”
PROGRESS! 
To avoid turning this into a complete hijack: The old trope of taking a secret agent and giving him/her immersion lessons in a foreign language so he/she will be able to pass as a native speaker in an incredibly short period of time is absolute crap. It takes years before anyone can come close to that level of proficiency.
I think it probably has to do with the size of the school, as well. I began my college career at a tiny private liberal-arts school that offered a class called “Chemistry for Non-Chemists”. Which was exactly what it sounded like: an intro-level chemistry class for students who didn’t have a strong grounding in mathematics or physical sciences. It was taught by the head of the department, who didn’t seem to mind (and was very good at) teaching a bunch of English and philosophy majors. At the large state university to which I later transferred, that would have been unthinkable.
It occurs to me now that Dr. Blackburn, whose responsibilities no doubt included ensuring that the Chemistry Department got their share of the school’s budget, might have been hoping with that class to snare a few students for his department. In Basin and Range, John McPhee profiles a prominent geologist at Princeton, who teaches survey courses for exactly that reason.
At the universities I know, that would mean that ‘head of department’, like ‘teaching a bunch of engineering majors’, a job nobody wanted.
But perhaps disinterested English and philosophy majors are more polite 
Totally late 20th c. feature. Don’t know if they still have them, but have lived in two buildings with them.
One thing: you can go down them, but not up (noticed on an episode of Friends, that they got this right). They have shock absorber-like retracters, so that when your weight is on them, descending, they fall down, slowly, but then when you get off, they retract, so they are too high up for someone to use them to get into a building.
Albeit, that was only true for the ones that exited from the apartments. There was one from a building I lived in that was a ladder exit from my floor hallway to the ground; it was a pretty big jump from the last rung, but I did it lots of times, to avoid the walk around the block, and I’m sure tall, muscular people could get up it; so could anyone standing on a confederate’s shoulders.
This bugs me, too. Where’s the sex towel?
Late 20th century? I see them all the time in old movies and TV shows that predate my birth. They were comfortable places to sleep and hang out when the weather was hot. Or are we talking about two different things here?
My father became a native-like speaker of Russian, after several years of classes, then several years of living in Leningrad, at which time he went to a Russian speech therapist, who treated his lingering American accent (he started classes in the US when he was 16, which was the age at which he entered college, so he started learning when still fairly young) like a speech impediment, isolated the sounds and intonations that “marked” his speech, and retrained him to say them “correctly” [READ: like a native].
The whole process of speaking like a native took about 5 years, and my father was a brilliant man who was very highly motivated, and also fairly young-- mid-20s-- when he was in Russia the first time.
He did learn to speak so well, though, that he was often mistaken for Russian, and once was even thrown out of a place (a hard currency store) that was permitted only to foreign nationals, not to Soviet Citizens, because the police would not believe he was not Russian. It was his proudest moment.
The platforms and stairs have existed since about 1900. What is LATE 20th century is the retracting stairs. For much of the early part of the century, the stairs were an invitation to burglars.
People taking a fuck break in the jungle while fleeing from the Mau-Mau or in the desert when fleeing from the Nazis. Especially when (a) they’ve only just met and (b) haven’t washed or bathed in days. Yeccch! 
If you want a really good laugh, watch The Willoughby Conspiracy sometime. The scene where Sidney Poitier and Persis Khambatta get it on in the bolthole while hiding from the SA police minutes after they’ve met for the first time is supposed to be erotic. It ain’t. It’s just hilarious.
KRAMER: Aha! Got it!
At least in New York, they’re very common in older buildings. The wrought-iron ones became required after the tragic 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.. Building codes were changed in 1968 to required indoor stairways and sprinkler systems.
Many New Yorkers used to use their fire escapes as a balcony during the summer, sitting out there in a lawn chair and watching the world go by and even barbecuing.
I’m usually taken for Bulgarian or Baltic (and on occasion Russian), but never American. I feel such a sense of accomplishment! 
… And then I listen to my daughter, who’s perfectly bilingual, and realize I will never, ever speak Russian as well as she does. 
What I’ve noticed are those who receive emergency phone calls (at home) that require them to fly out immediately. In a panic, the person opens all their dresser drawers, grabbing perfectly folded piles of pants, shirts, and sweaters after which they’re stuffed into a suitcase. That suitcase is zipped–stuffed with all needed clothes and sundries–as the person dashes off to catch the plane.
Everyone I know is usually washing clothes the night before their flight.
… Or the morning of the same day. 
Whenever I go to a party I always look for the pensive cool non-intoxicated woman standing out on the balcony alone smoking a cigarette and staring off as she thinks about something far more important than the party. But I always miss her somehow.
… And neither does a man standing alone silently and looking deep and mysterious attract women. 
I actually wrote in my Match.com profile when I was 22 that I was looking for that guy. I never did find him.
Darling! Where were you when I was relatively young and healthy?!? 