Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While carbon dioxide allows the warming rays of the sun to reach the earth, it blocks the excess heat that would normally reradiate out into space. As a result, the atmosphere is gradually growing warmer, thus melting the polar ice caps and raising sea levels. It may be years before scientists determine just how significant the greenhouse effect is -- but they know the process is accelerating. Sea levels are expected to rise at least a foot in just another half-century...
...There was one thing that was not manageable, though, not even with all Parker's Snopesian smarts. Elvis' reckoning with history was beyond anyone's reach, including, at the last, his very own. He died bloated with his own excess and everyone else's expectations. He did not invent rock 'n' roll, but he forged it and focused it, and he was the first great rock superstar. He haunted his contemporaries, like Jerry Lee Lewis, who once showed up outside Graceland waving a pistol and demanding an audience. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty -- all dreamed...
...Harry McPherson. But for all his muscle flexing, Johnson chose to retire rather than run for re-election in the teeth of the Viet Nam protests. Six years later, Nixon would resign, swept from power by public disapproval and Congress's instigation of impeachment proceedings. The Executive arrogance and excess in Viet Nam and Watergate spawned legitimate concerns throughout Washington, producing a city that remains inordinately devoted to scrutinizing and humbling strong leaders...
...full historical awareness tempered by regional shop practice and local material. Thus they invented forms peculiar to America, like the deeply carved blockfront desk with shell motifs made by Townsend and Goddard in Newport, R.I. But American neoclassical "constitutional" furniture radiates a sense of lightness and straightforwardness; it rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic, mercantile temper. It spoke of royal courts. The desire for a general style that asserted first principles, tended toward abstraction and worshiped antiquity -- this mattered greatly to the young Republic in the 1780s...
...clear that the news media have prevailed, at least in the court of law. While many news organizations have lost their first-round libel verdicts, the media have won most major cases that went through the full appellate process. Moreover, while juries have rendered more than 30 verdicts in excess of $1 million since 1980, according to the Libel Defense Resource Center, not one judgment has topped even half that sum after appeals. The word seems to be getting through to potential plaintiffs. Says veteran First Amendment Attorney James Goodale: "Libel litigation is at the lowest level that I have...