Word: hairbreadth
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...novelist lined up as many dramatic events as the author does here, his work would be blasted as contrived. Lowenstein, a magnificent business writer, creates an almost novelistic accounting of the all-too-real 2008 financial collapse. The book opens in late summer: Lehman Brothers is a hairbreadth away from collapse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been taken over by the feds, and AIG is veering toward disaster. After several decades of laissez-faire regulation, Wall Street is crying out to be rescued by the government...
...shackles. "Yes, I'm happy for my country," he said, just minutes after accepting his first-ever Olympic gold. "But I'm also happy for my family, my coach, my friends and even myself." Teammate Hiroyuki Tomita, who nailed a spectacular 9.850 high-bar routine to clinch Japan's hairbreadth victory was even more blunt: "People say there must have been lots of pressure, but I think there's less pressure today, because there's not so much national pride depending on each victory...
...arrived in the form of a huge rock, about 1,000 ft. in diameter, that hurtled past the planet at 68,000 m.p.h. The asteroid, newly dubbed 2001 YB5, missed us by some 500,000 miles, about twice our distance from the moon. For astronomers, however, that was a hairbreadth, and a dramatic reminder that space is filled with debris that has devastated our planet in the past and could very likely to do so again...
...fought early this year about who should be House chaplain, and invited the Illinois Republican to lunch. "I know we've had our differences, and I want it to get better," Gephardt said, and Hastert agreed. Gephardt told TIME that the message to Congress from Tuesday's hairbreadth election was, "We want you to get in the middle and get things done...
...what about near misses? As recently as 1996, an asteroid about a third of a mile wide passed within 280,000 miles of Earth--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. It was the largest object ever observed to pass that close and, had it hit, would have caused an explosion in the 5,000-to-12,000-megaton range. What was particularly unnerving about this flyby is that the asteroid was discovered only four days before it hurtled past Earth. All the more reason for a detection system that will discover asteroids early, plot their paths and predict, many years...