Word: adjuster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...EARTH DAY. Rather than surrender the name "environmentalist" to their foes, they have labeled the opposition "preservationists." Many loggers never finished high school but followed their fathers and grandfathers into the woods. They rise in the dark at 3 or 4 in the morning, pull up their suspenders and adjust rough hide pads on their left shoulders. The pads cradle the saws and, like trivets, shield the men from the hot blades that would burn their flesh through their flannel shirts. Their pants legs are tattered so that if they are suddenly snagged, the material will tear rather than hold...
...these places, the shock of seeing children fighting fades. It's like entering a darkened room: rather quickly the eyes adjust to a dimmer light. The mind grows accustomed to the sight of a little boy among the men, wearing the same uniform, carrying the same weapon, walking with the same tired swagger. It is from a distance that the reality of child soldiers appalls. Even people living close to the fighting find it easier to forget. Hamed Karzai, the urbane spokesman of the Afghan rebel government, spends most of his time mediating between rival mujahedin factions. Sipping...
Stern is a sociological immigrant as well. A recent widower, he repeatedly finds himself in situations where he must adjust to new customs. Sensitivity, he discovers, is outmoded. His physician son Peter sounds like an Army medic when he tells his father to drop his drawers during a urological examination. Daughter Marta, a lawyer, does not ask permission when she moves in to help with the Maison Dixon case. Women have changed in other ways. They are eager to introduce him to tricky bedroom maneuvers. "Did you like that?" asks one. "The wings of a dove," is Stern's courtly...
...great sense of humor," says Sengal M. Selassie '90, Knight's friend and future Manhattan roommate. "That humor allows him to adjust really well to all types of situations...
Perhaps we've seen the limit of what sociologists used to call the great accomplishment of the modern personality: the ability to balance contradictory ideas. But now we don't even want to seek balance. Who can know what to believe when presidential candidates adjust their positions to the latest polls and executives script movies and books according to marketing studies...