Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deficit-choked American economy as well as to perestroika. Rather than negotiating trims in a few weapons programs, Bush could propose demobilizing significant portions of each side's military, testing whether Gorbachev would go along with dismantling whole divisions and reconfiguring forces so as to create a less dangerous world...
Such attractions were rare on mainstream TV in the past. Rod Serling's Twilight Zone served up some chills, but it was less interested in frightening the viewer than in offering moral parables. Star Trek will forever be enshrined in TV's science-fiction pantheon, but it wasn't nearly so scary as the sight of the cast members growing old in the movies that have followed. The 1960s anthology series The Outer Limits represented the outer limit of TV's flirtation with the fantastic, while Kolchak: The Night Stalker was the closest the medium ever got to a good...
Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales (two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse...
...pesticides. "Most of us are more secure with respect to basic survival than we were a generation ago," says Ann Fisher, manager of the EPA's Risk Communication Program. "We're now in a position where we look with fear at what might once have been thought of as less serious dangers...
Experts on risk perception generally agree that people tend to be less concerned about dangers they incur voluntarily, like cigarette smoking and fast driving. They are more resentful of risks they feel have been imposed upon them, like the threat of mishaps at a nearby nuclear plant. They are more sensitive to risks they can control -- for instance, through laws that ban pesticides or require safety warnings -- than they are to those they feel they can do nothing about -- like acts of nature. "People choose what to fear," says Aaron Wildavsky, co-author of Risk and Culture. "What...