Word: habitability
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...books I have read and the places I read them. Foolhardily, I often try to read and walk at the same time. (My comprehension and my walking speed both diminish, but there are more distractions in my room than on a sidewalk in Waltham.) An unexpected consequence of this habit is that books and places become inextricably connected, each evoking the other as surely as the smell of Christmas trees means family and childhood...
...This squalor was unlike the Hermit. Aside from the junked cars, he seemed to be an orderly man. If he was crazy - which I doubt - his insanity did not express itself in disorder but rather in the reverse, in a rigorous private tidiness of habit. He was not a man to allow something as intimate as his trash to be on view to passing strangers. What was the meaning of the mess in the drive...
...tundra, the Bush administration needs to lead itself to a period of introspection. There's a fatal pattern at work, and the election of 2002 is approaching at the speed of light. Unless the Bush people find a way to reverse an ancient pattern of complacent Republican navigation - the habit of running aground on the rocks of their own stupidity - then 2002 is going to be a disaster for them...
...much of Bush's antagonism towards Yale was contrived, an attitude adopted after his Ivy League pedigree was used against him in his failed 1978 bid to become a Congressman from Midland, Texas. Even his friends in Midland would tease Bush about his preppie East Coast ways, especially his habit of wearing tattered penny loafers without socks. It wasn't long before he chucked the loafers in favor of cowboy boots and was vowing that he would never again allow a political opponent - or a business one, for that matter - to portray him as an effete Easterner...
...self-respecting mayor would pick a police chief who had never been a cop. It would be counterintuitive for any large enterprise, but it is dangerous in an organization in which people wear guns to work and have the power to put other people in jail. But the habit, shared by Presidents and cheered by the press, is to select an FBI director who knows virtually nothing about managing a 28,000-strong institution like the FBI--that secretive, hidebound clerisy. The last three FBI directors have been federal judges, wisemen trained to balance law enforcement with civil liberties. Judges...