Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second acts in American lives," Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked. But in the lives of American writers, there often is one, and it is the second act of Long Day's Journey into Night: a downward spiral of drink, disillusion and self-destructiveness. Jean Stafford followed just such a pattern, all the more regrettably because her first act was so full of energy % and promise. Fresh from a Colorado upbringing, she married Poet Robert Lowell and at 29 published the best seller Boston Adventure. Other marriages and other books followed, and so did poor health and a passel of troubles, many...
American business executives wish they could say the same. Their workers are increasingly caught in traffic because commuting patterns have changed drastically in recent decades. The interstate highway system was originally designed to carry motorists primarily from city to city; its beltways were constructed mainly as bypasses for long-distance travelers. Local commuters, by contrast, generally moved in and out of urban downtown areas in a radial pattern, along the paths of mass transit and major thoroughfares. But the majority of work is no longer downtown: the suburbs contain 60% of current metropolitan jobs and 67% of all new ones...
...reason the digits have been hopping erratically is the interplay between the lack of deep commitment to either candidate and the combatants' response to that dearth. The Republicans set a pattern of pit-bull negativism earlier in the cycle than usual, and the Democrats have felt compelled to respond. When voters are relatively clear about their convictions, negative attacks are unlikely to produce large swings. But with the public still hazy about what George Bush and Michael Dukakis are really for, each candidate hopes to paint a dark image of the other. That, in turn, discourages positive loyalty...
...standard Johnson outrages: an interview with L.B.J. as the President sat on the toilet, a nude policy council in the superheated White House swimming pool. But from his diary of the crucial years 1964 to 1967 and from the shadows of his memory, the writer reconstructs the larger pattern of behavior that disturbed him. Goodwin did not speak up sooner, he writes, because of "misplaced loyalty or personal cowardice." An angry swarm of Johnson intimates now attacking Goodwin suggest more basic motives: money and notoriety...
Goodwin's postpublication rebuttal is that the Johnson loyalists were too close. They became hardened to his dangerous behavior, denying the reality of what was happening to the man. "Johnson's excessive secrecy and lying, his suspicion, fit into a pattern that made it hard for him to make proper decisions," said Goodwin last week. "The final irony is that the only guy who saw how disastrous the Viet Nam War could be was Johnson himself." In the book, Goodwin quotes a gloomy Johnson proclaiming, "I'm going to be known as the President who lost Southeast Asia." Paranoid...