Word: detailism
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...committing suicide or helping someone else to do so. It includes charts of lethal dosages for 18 prescription drugs, primarily pain killers and sleeping tablets; it debates and debunks the merits of cyanide; it offers abundant practical advice about asphyxiation by plastic bag or auto exhaust. Seemingly every detail is addressed: mixing pills with yogurt or pudding so that the patient does not vomit or pass out before ingesting a lethal amount; not turning off the telephone or message machine, because "any changes will only alert callers to something unusual happening"; having family members avoid any direct physical assistance...
...fundamentalists apparently bent on sabotaging Rafsanjani's rapprochement with the West stabbed to death Shahpour Bakhtiar, the Shah's last Prime Minister, inside his home in a Paris suburb. This was the second attempt on Bakhtiar's life, and its success embarrassed the French government. The four-member police detail that watches Bakhtiar's house round the clock did not even notice that anything was amiss until 36 hours after the slaying...
Through his publicist, Reubens denied the accusation, but that little detail hardly registered among the seismic aftershocks of the original arrest. Reubens' mug shots made the front pages; heavy psychological hitters like Dr. Lee Salk and Dr. Joyce Brothers were enlisted to advise parents on what to tell the kids. The radio and TV airwaves were suddenly alive with Pee-wee jokes (His favorite baseball team? The Montreal Expos. His next television project? A remake of Diff'rent Strokes). CBS yanked the five remaining repeat episodes of Pee-wee's Playhouse, and the Disney-MGM Studios pulled a two- minute...
Name a well-publicized episode over the past six years, and Auletta supplies the kind of detail that sources offer only when they know their accounts will not blow up in their faces in the next day's papers. What led to NBC News president Larry Grossman's downfall? Auletta traces it partly to a disastrous dinner party that Grossman gave on the night of the sixth game of the Mets-Red Sox World Series. (General Electric chairman Jack Welch, a rabid Red Sox fan, wanted to watch the game.) Why did Dan Rather walk off the set in September...
...fight to gain control of the CBS board, ABC News president Roone Arledge's battle to keep 20/20 on Thursdays at 10 p.m. -- was once a hot topic in media circles. Today they seem more like questions for a 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit. In his zest for detail, Auletta trudges dutifully through events that are now just so much TV-industry ephemera...