Word: explainer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to wrestle in private with his decision to rewrite the family history, it was harder to have to explain it in public, to defend her parents against the charge that their heroic story had been somehow airbrushed. Albright would tell a friend the night after the Post story broke that she felt shaken and somehow violated. The implications of the questioning--What did she know and when did she know it?--made it sound as though the story she was so proud of was somehow false, rather than incomplete. By the next day, she would be defending her parents...
...mind-set is Munich," Albright has often explained. "Most of my generation's was Vietnam." Albright's orientation is used to explain her willingness to confront bullies with force. But the Munich Conference in 1938 that gave Hitler the green light to annex one-third of Czechoslovakia carried many lessons beyond the dangers of appeasement, and one was surely that it is never wise to play from a position of weakness. Albright knew early on that you can't do a thing in foreign policy without power. So she didn't waste any time "establishing her presence," as an observer...
...Russians seem to be falling in love with economics. This is because Russia still has to indoctrinate the fundamentals of economic theory into its people. We have outgrown this need and have found that modern Americans have very little use for highly abstract and sophisticated theories that fail to explain reality. In order for Russia's transition to a free-market system to be both permanent and stable, grounding economic theories in its children seems to be a must. American children know it naturally; Russian children must be taught it. So while it may strike us as strange that seven...
Withers tends toward the darkest possible explanation of what happened: that "somebody did bad things to these people." Theories based on mere familial conspiracy do not explain the Murray-O'Hairs' sudden abandonment of the house, Robin's car and their canines. "They loved their home, and I want to tell you, man, they loved those dogs," says Kerns...
...repeated, obsessive references to her reproductive surgeon betray the narrator's deepest concern without, apparently, her being aware of the disclosure. Whatever Dr. Loquesto was supposed to do for her somehow did not work, in a way she doesn't explain. She is 40 and childless, and Hecht has subtly grounded all these remarkably funny and engaging stories in the fundamental sadness of mortality...