Word: hysteria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Even though the new rules are no different than those dumped on other Boston-area universities, and even though there has been, and will be, a lot more to Harvard-Yale than the now-missing last few hours of the tailgate, hysteria seems to be the order of the day. Anyone who claims that the new rules stand to ruin Harvard-Yale, or who refuses to show up at the tailgate in protest, is being epically silly. After all, it could be a whole lot worse...
...vampire," director Catherine Hardwicke marvels. Actually, the Twilighter - as the mostly female devotees of Stephenie Meyer's vampire romances call themselves - had driven hours to get pictures of her baby with the cast. Even before Twilight hits theaters Nov. 21, the series' readers have exhibited enough excitement - if not hysteria - to persuade the studio, Summit Entertainment, to get screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg cracking on adaptations of the next two books. (Read TIME's 10 Questions with Stephenie Meyer...
...smart these days. We've grown so inured to the often unbelievable nonsense on television, or the absurd chain emails we gather in our inboxes, that the idea of a hysteria-inciting radio (radio!) play is laughable. So try, for a spell, to put yourself in the shoes of listeners who tuned in 70 years ago to The Mercury Theater on the Air's performance of The War of the Worlds...
...radio play itself became a textbook example of mass hysteria: in 1940, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril used an analysis of listeners' reactions to posit that social panics occur when large groups can't discern reliable sources of advice from unreliable ones. That said, there's little chance that a media hoax of this magnitude could happen again. We've grown too sophisticated, too cynical to believe that little green men from Mars with big silver spaceships will land in New Jersey, of all places. We're too smart, for example, to be fooled by telephone calls suggesting that John McCain...
...fact of contemporary politics is that we've lost the ability to get through a campaign without transforming honorable alternatives into cartoons of good and evil. Disagreement is out; denunciation is in. The distinctive tune of our day is hysteria with a drumbeat of hyperbole, all set in the key of bad faith...