Word: explainer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after the end of Harvard's disappointing loss to Columbia in Saturday's football game, there stood Coach Tim Murphy with quarterback Vin Ferrara. Separated by no more than ten inches, the two men--one the teacher, the other the pupil--engaged in a quick, private conversation that helps explain why this 1995 season still holds many thrills for Crimson fans...
What could have caused such indiscriminate carnage? Marauding comets, exploding stars, greenhouse warming, ice-age cooling, sea-level drops, sea-level rises, ocean stagnation, oxygen depletion--every calamity imaginable has been invoked to explain the Permian extinction. But none of these agents of doom, argues geologist Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochron ol ogy Center in California (and lead author of the Science article), comes as close to explaining what happened at the end of the Permian as the rampant, prolonged volcanism that created the terrace-like formations known as the Siberian Traps...
...Smithsonian paleobiologist Douglas Erwin warned his colleagues last week, it is dangerous to try to explain a complex calamity like the Permian extinction in simplistic terms. The Great Dying, Erwin believes, was produced by an interplay of many forces--"a tangled web rather than a single mechanism"--and if paleontologists and geologists want to sort out the puzzle, they must spend long hours in the field searching for further clues. Even after scientists reach a consensus about what caused the extinction, observes Renne, a central mystery will remain. What is it about life, he marvels, that enables it to rebound...
...really that much difference between what the Clinton Administration wants to do with Medicare and what the Republicans on the Hill want to do with Medicare? Do they both want to cut it? Yes. So what's the fight? Why don't they just figure out what it is, explain it to the American people and lead us there? No, the Democratic Administration is going to claim that the Republicans are doing it to pay off rich people, and the Republicans are claiming that the Democrats just don't want them to break up the welfare state. That's wonderful...
Evolutionary psychology thus helps explain why modern feminism got its start after the suburbanization of the 1950s. The landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan grew out of her 1959 conversation with a suburban mother who spoke with "quiet desperation" about the anger and despair that Friedan came to call "the problem with no name" and a doctor dubbed "the housewife's syndrome." It is only natural that modern mothers rearing children at home are more prone to depression than working mothers, and that they should rebel...