Word: explainer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This doesn't mean coming clean isn't the right thing to do--just that it isn't the panacea some make it out to be. Imagine if Clinton were to confess, reversing his finger-wagging denial and replacing it with a tortured definition of sex to help explain his earlier claims of innocence. Even if he said he did it to spare his family, the support he enjoys among a majority of Americans would sink like a stone. It's one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered...
...discovery has already had some practicalimplications, helping to explain the symptomsexperienced by people who lose their color visionin accidents...
...discover that luck, as Mae West might have said, had nothing to do with it. As a candidate, he remembered almost none of the artful maneuvers and broken commitments that had allowed him to escape military service. "I'd been in public life a long time," he said, to explain his memory lapses, "and no one had ever questioned my role." Actually his draft record had been raised in almost every one of his Arkansas political campaigns--more than half a dozen of them. But who's counting...
...Monica Effect helps explain why Clinton made nary a peep while the Senate slowly strangled campaign-finance reform--a legacy item if ever there was one--and why he sat idly in June as Senator John McCain's tobacco bill went down. Tobacco was Clinton's top domestic item for 1998--not just because he wanted to be the first President to face down the industry but also because the estimated $100 billion that was to come from McCain's bill in the next five years would have paid for many of Clinton's other ideas, such as preretirement Medicare...
...obsession with the lottery has even come to acquire an actual psychological label, "lottery fantasy syndrome," a term coined by Los Angeles therapist Robert Butterworth to explain the depression that occurs when ticket buyers pin all their hopes on winning, and don't. "It doesn't matter if you spend a dollar or a thousand dollars. You can be hit with lottery-fantasy syndrome as a result of simply buying a ticket and living your dream before it actually occurs," says Butterworth. When people don't win, he explains, "depression and apathy can set in, and life can seem even...