Word: habit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fallows goes a bit far in skewering the press for becoming too querulous about official pronouncements. That habit began with the deceits of Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam and Richard Nixon about Cambodia and Watergate--and for good reason. But he is right that the effort to be tough often degenerates into being merely snarling and snide, with an elitist irony substituting for honest skepticism. Reporters earn their investigative stripes by chasing scandals and catching politicians in flip-flops, which divert attention from truly important policy issues that must be resolved. "The result is an arms race of 'attitude,' in which...
METROPOLITAN SMOKERS ARE A FORlorn lot these days. As more cities ban cigarettes in public places, smokers are altering every daily habit but the one they most crave. They take lunch at the restaurant bar because only there can they enjoy a quick stick of nicotine for dessert. They dash from their seats at the football stadium to the rest-room, missing the play of the day for the puff of the moment. Shivering in shirtsleeves outside their office complexes, they increase the risk that they will succumb not to emphysema but to chilblains...
...truer measure of whether the new ecosystem he had created in the House would actually work the way he planned. "You can't, in a free society, postpone permanently major arguments," he says, " and the job of leadership is to manage it." That night he erased decades of habit in the House: the habits that members are more loyal to their supporters than to their Speaker, that the real work of Congress amounted to the horse trading of small favors in the committee room, that freshmen in Congress are about as powerful as the doorkeepers, that the House is where...
After last night's game, Harvard is convinced that it is back in the winning habit. Whether or not it is there to stay will be determined in the land of 10,000 lakes. Harvard 5 Princeton...
...Crimson phone poll, the vast majority (57 percent) of Harvard students chose the category of pure enjoyment as best describing the reason why they smoked. This was followed by social pressure (13 percent); other, which includes drunkenness and curiosity (12 percent); the desire to relieve stress (II percent); and habit (7 percent...