Word: inborn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...couldn't understand what was happening to me. I looked at the novel and thought it was a failure. I hadn't told enough about Charlie's early life, Conrad was dull and so forth. It seemed useless to go on with it." At this point, Wolfe's inborn personal reticence became an obstacle to his recovery. He once told an interviewer that he would not take his troubles to his best friend, and he has, in print, cast an unwaveringly gimlet eye on all the therapy manias of the age. "The Me Decade" was his much-quoted and derogatory...
...insouciance helped him escape blame for the unconventional accounting practices of Oliver North. John F. Kennedy's sense of ironic detachment--common to rich kids since the time of Prince Hal--allowed him to slip out from under the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. And Franklin Roosevelt's inborn aristocratic bearing led his public to assume during the Depression that he knew what he was doing, even when he didn't, which was often...
...genetically encoded trait--such as a tendency to produce too little dopamine--might intersect with environmental influences to create a serious behavioral disorder. Therapists have long known of patients who, in addition to having psychological problems, abuse drugs as well. Could their drug problems be linked to some inborn quirk? Might an inability to absorb enough dopamine, with its pleasure-giving properties, cause them to seek gratification in drugs...
...make one thing clear before any large, angry men come knocking at The Harvard Crimson's door: defensive players are just as intelligent as anyone else around. Admittedly, however, that side of the ball centers around quick reactions and instincts, inborn qualities which are only partially refinable...
...result is both eccentric and oddly endearing. Kirstein portrays himself as a child with "an inborn greed for artificed splendor," mesmerized by patterns and designs. One of the longest episodes in the book recounts his intense quest for just the right emblem to paint on his canoe paddle at summer camp. Citing an occasion when his father gave him a $20 bill, Kirstein remembers "the papery cash, its tough fibrous thinness inlaid with bits of red and green silk." The dreamy young man did not take much interest in academics, but he passed Harvard's entrance exam anyway. Once enrolled...