Word: ego
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chances of becoming an alcoholic, nor does coming from a family with many problems increase the risk. Vaillant is reluctant to make predictions about behavior, but believes that the best sign that a child may not develop into an alcoholic as an adult is an "ineffable" quality-ego strength-that seems to come from experiencing a sense of competence when the person is young...
...generation of youths for its power. Rock cannot--and should not--exist in a vacuum. It is by "the people" and should be for the people, although that might be wishful thinking in this age of corporate control. "Serious" art--for our purposes, classical music--emphasizes the artist, his ego, and a purely subjective and personal outlook. Success usually comes only after the classical composer dies and sometimes not at all. And, as Rockwell argues, the best classical music often comes from the outsider, the artist who is not affected by the corrosive influences of monetary success, trendiness, or peer...
...Chicago drug-abuse counselor and former user, "you're indestructible, perfect, the giant of your dreams." Donald, 42, a Philadelphia-born investment banker, lost his job, squandered his inheritance, and developed a hole in the septum of his nose. Nevertheless, he says, "I felt powerful, in control. Cocaine is ego food. It feeds the ego like nothing I've ever seen in my life." Tony, the owner of a Denver tire-repair shop, used four grams a day. Says he: "I wanted to feel like a kingpin, the life of the party. Coke gave me all of this...
...Rachel shuttles between Washington and Manhattan, she oscillates between hysteria and impartial reportage. But if she is contradictory as a character, she is consistent as an alter ego. Nora Ephron once imagined herself as a "wallflower at the orgy, . .. everyone else is having a marvelous time, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all." It was a premonitory passage. Here she is in 1983, everybody sleeping around like characters in a Restoration play, while she records the events with misery and wit. At times her comedy seems borrowed...
...Occasionally, his characters were too busy striking attitudes to hit honest veins of emotion. His symbols sometimes multiplied like fruit flies and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger was the unhealthy narcissism of most modern art, whose tendency has been to gaze inward and contemplate the artist's ego, as well as his navel, to the point of myopia and hallucination. Almost inevitably, he suffered the attrition of dramatic power that afflicts most playwrights after...