Word: closeness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...game time against Oberlin, the Swarthmore students weren't behaving like Quakers. Close to 200 showed up for the game--not bad on a campus of 1,380. It is more common to see students at games wearing Swarthmore math department T shirts (WE MATH GOOD) than football jerseys. "A lot of people don't care about football here," said senior Paul Dickson, an engineering major. "It doesn't exactly fit into the culture." But the team's ignominious run has aroused the curious. Said another senior, Abbas Ebrahim: "There's the whole Cinderella thing about the streak...
...Hogwarts to protect Harry, but he keeps fainting whenever a dementor comes near him. A sympathetic professor tells Harry why dementors merit fear: "They breed in the darkest, filthiest places, they create decay and despair, they drain peace, hope and happiness out of any human who comes too close to them... Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life...
...class, high school series serve as surrogate examinations of social barriers. (Or certain ones: while the great dramatic potential of high school comes from its throwing together kids whose parents don't work or play together, these shows are almost uniformly white.) This In crowd-obsessed setting comes as close as is Nielsen-feasible to admitting that class is still in session: that it does matter where you were born and what you own, that there are invisible psychological obstacles to moving outside your circle, that social mobility is hardly frictionless. When school brain Lindsay Weir on Freaks, for instance...
Purdy doesn't wish to be a spoilsport. He's negative only about negativity. Temperamentally, he's an optimist who places his faith in action, not attitude. One issue close to his tender rural heart is the preservation of West Virginia wilderness from the mountain-leveling predations of modern coal mining. A student of law and forestry at Yale, he sees himself arguing his causes in court someday, but his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism. "We need today a kind of thought and action that is too little contemplated yet remains possible...
...recalled that my father had been afflicted by this strange ailment, but I knew little about shingles until I did some digging. I learned that shingles could be thought of as the revenge of the chicken pox, or of varicella-zoster, the virus behind this childhood disease. A close cousin of herpes simplex, which causes cold sores, varicella-zoster can be beaten back by the immune system but never eradicated. Like a bandit pursued by a posse, it retreats to a safe haven--bundles of nerve cells in the spinal cord or cranium. There varicella-zoster lies dormant, usually...