Word: mania
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Bravo for your piece about the obsession with sports among kids and parents [SPORT, July 12]! The true cost of parents' foisting their competitive mania on their children, however, goes far beyond the price of uniforms and private athletic tutors. It is sad to see all those kids worshipping sports stars when they could be involved in the sciences, arts and scouting. Ouch! If sports has replaced religion in American life, whom have we to blame but ourselves if our kids carry guns to school? JONATHAN LOWE Tucson, Ariz...
Pretty much the same, probably, if yours is among the growing number of American families that have succumbed to the mania of kids' athletics as they are conceived in the late 1990s: hyperorganized, hypercompetitive, all consuming and often expensive. Never before have America's soccer fields, baseball diamonds, hockey rinks and basketball courts been so aswarm with children kicking, swinging, checking and pick-and-rolling...
...decade in which a bull market and initial public offering mania have made millionaires seem commonplace, we have a financial villain whose outsize chicanery and supersize embezzlement may be a match for our gaudy times. Martin Frankel, 44, a.k.a. David Rosse, a.k.a. Eric Stevens, accused of absconding with as much as $335 million through a bewildering web of insurance companies, bogus investment funds and phony charitable organizations, was, in his own charmingly inept manner, pursuing a twisted but very '90s version of the American Dream...
Obviously, I have no great sympathy for Salinger's privacy mania. If you crave total privacy, don't write books, and if you must, certainly don't publish them. And, for God's sake, lay off the missives. Furthermore, if absolute solitude is your thing, don't have relationships with other people, and surely don't have sex with them. Another good rule of thumb: don't have children. They eventually talk too. Salinger's daughter Margaret ("Peggy") is writing her own memoir about life with Daddy...
...fine turn as Nick Leeson, the British futures trader whose fast-and-loose market executions brought down his employer, Barings, the prominent English bank. The film takes a sympathetic view of Leeson, which is fine; the problem is, it never offers a sense of the man behind the mania. What does come through is that Leeson ate a lot of candy during crises. Cadbury wrappers shouldn't be made signifiers of emotional distress...