Word: distractibility
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...pack, however, unless its ranks have been seriously depleted, only one female each year gives birth to a litter. Even more notable, some studies suggest, the alpha male (or executive wolf), who makes all pack decisions and conducts the hunt, tends not to breed-perhaps because it would distract him from command. Says Fox primly: Man needs to "emulate the wolf ... in exercising greater dominion over sexuality and incredible reproductive potential...
Miss also involves the viewer in perceptual games which distract from an appreciation of the works themselves. Specifically, Miss repeatedly confuses one's perception of space by exaggerating perspective. In Perimeters/Pavillions/Decoys, an outdoor piece done on Long Island in 1978, Miss sets up three apparently identical wooden towers on a field. The towers, however, actually decrease in size as they recede into the distance, so that the last tower appears farther away than it actually is. In an indoor piece which resembles a walled-in staircase, Miss abbreviates the perspective by angling the walls together as the stairs recede...
...himself, not society." The '60s may have held down the teen-age suicide rate by providing a sense of community, built around drugs and opposition to Viet Nam. "But even that's gone," says Los Angeles Psychiatrist Irving Berkovitz. "There's nothing to distract a teen-ager today...
...different issue worried Paul Keough, of Sherborn, Mass., whose brother William, superintendent of the American School in Pakistan, had been visiting Tehran when the embassy was seized. Paul Keough argued that the emotionally wrenching sight of relatives pleading in Tehran for permission to see the hostages would distract world opinion from the "human indignity" of the captives' plight. Said he: "The main issue is that this is a violation of international law, whether they let the relatives in to visit...
...each country, Naipaul runs across the same problem: imperialism dies hard. Imperial powers left scars on the cultures as well as the economies of their colonies. With acute powers of observation, Naipaul isolates their lingering presences in the rhetoric of Third World leaders. They are entertainers who distract their followers from facing the problems of development. Their songs use borrowed words: angry, anti-imperialist jargon grafted on to desires for a Western, consumer economy...