Word: apex
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With his performance as Howard Brackett in In & Out--the Frank Oz comedy about an Indiana schoolteacher who is outed as a homosexual during a former student's televised acceptance speech at the Oscars--Kline brings his Shakespearean inner torment to a comic apex. "I always assumed he'd always known he was gay since adolescence," Kline says of the character. "But like most of us, he has found a way to accommodate that denial." His portrayal of Ben Hood, a father torn between responsibility and lust in The Ice Storm, a 1970s period drama set in suburban Connecticut, also...
This wouldn't happen if some cops didn't believe they had a mandate for such behavior. Even though the rate of serious crime in the U.S. has fallen to levels not seen since the early 1970s, public fear of crime has reached an apex. TV transmits vivid pictures of actual violence into the nation's living rooms on a daily basis in more and more graphic detail. Politicians respond to the mounting public fear with declarations of war on drugs and crime that resonate with voters, from presidential to local elections. They also play well to the police culture...
...keeping aquatic wildlife in balance. Scientists now understand that the ocean ecosystem has been evolving over hundreds of millions of years as an integrated whole--a biological machine in which each component has a vital function. For most sharks, that function is to serve as what biologists call an apex predator, the ocean equivalent of a lion or tiger or bear. Not only do they keep prey populations in check, but they also tend to eat the slowest, weakest and least wily individuals. In so doing, they improve the target species' gene pool, leaving the smarter, stronger individuals to reproduce...
...When an apex predator is removed from the food chain, this carefully balanced machine tends to go haywire. Without wolves and mountain lions to keep them in check, for example, some deer populations in the U.S. have skyrocketed. And in just the same way, experts believe, overfishing of sharks off Australia and Tasmania years ago led to an explosion in the octopus population and a subsequent decline of the spiny-lobster fishery. Declining numbers of hammerhead sharks off the Florida panhandle may have allowed stingrays to reach record numbers there. "It's impossible to predict the implications of removing sharks...
Rudenstine also created a new position toward the apex of the University, naming Dennis F. Thompson, a professor of political theory and founder of the inter-faculty initiative on Ethics and the Professions, to the position of associate provost...