Word: phenomenon
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...less sinister explanation for the alleged behavior of Yee and al-Halabi is that they became sympathetic to the prisoners' plight and wanted to pass news about them to their families. It is a well-known psychological phenomenon for guards to develop sympathies for their captives. Indeed, many of the prisoners are considered of marginal danger. According to a military source, only a handful at the camp are deemed to be hard-core al-Qaeda operatives, and they are segregated from the rest...
...many of us, learned that gender doesn’t mean everything that we thought it did, and that social norms come into being first by being practiced—and then accepted as truth. The culture fostered by parietal rules is a good example of this phenomenon. Today, the prospect of only seeing the opposite sex between the hours of 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., with the door open, seems dreadful to us. Yet even 30 years ago, it was considered the natural way that men and women should interact. Not too long from now, we?...
...perhaps the British simply disdain huge followings in general, preferring to prove their independence of spirit by listening to as different band from many of their peers as they can manage. This phenomenon exists in the US amongst those who enjoy name-checking monumentally obscure indie bands or unsigned underground rappers. Besides the reality glitch that was the Spice Girls, Britain seldom supports the monolithic popularity that, say, Eminem or Dave Matthews enjoys in the U.S. British artists endure by never getting too big, so that the armchair music fiends who judge the Mercury can nominate them with their consciences...
...antidote to tragedies, dramatic and mundane, is to be more mindful. When mindless, we let the past determine the present. We mistakenly seek certainty. We hold things still in our minds and then confuse the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. We look for the ways things are the same and miss all of the subtle ways in which things are different, despite the lip service we pay to the idea that things are always changing...
...employees, we are tired of stuffing our complex new lives into the simplistic old career structures that still dominate most jobs—a phenomenon I call “career taxidermy.” We want a life. We want families. We want the flexibility to control our own time. In other words, as individual economic citizens, we want more than just goods and services, paychecks and promotions. We want a “support economy,” an economy in which we can live our ever-more complex lives as we choose. And in return...