Word: mania
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...more than academic interest in the roulette wheel. He would lapse into an irrational, compulsive fever and spend all their money on a system of betting for which. Anna observed, he lacked the sang froid to execute successfully. But Anna saw that any attempt to condemn his mania would be useless--instead, she used it to her own advantage. Whenever he was tense, distraught, or ill-humored, she would encourage him to go to the casino. Inevitably he would return, unhappy with his losses--emotionally drained and much easier to deal with...
...unlike New Orleans, Houston, or even Princeton University, Harvard did not succumb to superdome mania. The designs call for small, stately new buildings that maintain the character of the senior building in the area--Dillon Field House. There is room in the area for a new track, swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts, wrestling room and a hockey rink--all of which place functional priorities over ornamental values...
According to Pike, the intelligence community's "mania for secrecy" was also partly responsible for the Yom Kippur War catching the U.S. by surprise in 1973. He said that U.S. intelligence agencies refused to let Pentagon and State Department officials see intercepted communications between the Soviets and Egyptians that "should have alerted us that a war was about to break...
Pyromania is the irresistible urge to set fires. There is no comparable term for the irresistible urge to extinguish them. Whatever that mania is called, New York City Fireman Dennis Smith, 35, has it in its most extreme form. In Smith's view, where there is fire there is always smoke-and it is his sworn duty to drown the flames and clear the air. As a zealous fire fighter, he has been taking care of urban conflagrations for twelve years. To dissipate the clouds of rumor and misinformation, he wrote Report from Engine Co. 82, a bestselling documentary...
First he explains the mania that provoked him. Like such disparate figures as Molly Bloom and Richard Nixon, Theroux says he has always been lured by the siren song of a train whistle: "I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." Thus his trip represented a once-in-a-lifetime act of massive self-indulgence, plus the chance to experience firsthand "the trains with the bewitching names: the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian." As an added bonus, the trips threw him together with several novels' worth of offbeat characters...