Word: distressingly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surgeries, but many who seek multiple cosmetic procedures aren't. Some patients who want repeated surgeries suffer from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), an illness defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by mental-health professionals as a "preoccupation with an imagined deficit in appearance" that causes distress in life. BDD sufferers may also be those who spend countless hours at the gym or abuse steroids. About three-quarters of BDD patients who have cosmetic procedures are dissatisfied with the outcome, according to a British study published in 2000 in Psychiatric Bulletin...
Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades...
...start with the statistics: First, most plane crashes are more like this one than we think. More people survive than die. Aircraft in distress don't drop, screaming, out of the sky into the fires of hell. They end up on the ground or in water, and people must get out quickly. Those who fare best are usually those who are prepared: the pilot who has flown for four decades and trained for calamity; the man in the exit row who has read the safety card...
...hoarded the kind of toy soldiers that struck extravagant poses, and left those that stood stiffly at attention to the other children. At the age of nine, Andy did a book of watercolors, full of musketeers and damsels in distress, and romantically titled The Clang of Steel. When he was twelve, Andy staged a memorable performance, Lilliputian-style in a theater that he made himself, of the battle in The White Company, the Arthur Conan Doyle drama of a staunch medieval company of soldiers, which N.C. had illustrated. The old playroom castle still sits in Andy's studio...
...This ruler-knows-best attitude can make Asians act more like subjects than citizens. Militaries - the other power pole in much of Asia - can meddle in politics without much public distress from the masses. Just look at how Bangkok office ladies cheerily handed carnations to the soldiers who carried out a 2006 coup against Thailand's democratically elected leader. When Asians finally do react against their governments, it is often in extremis, anger spilling onto the streets in revolutionary-style rallies...