Word: phenomenons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music teacher in New York City who works with underprivileged children, selected by lottery, at public schools. Labi used to study violin, but says her "fingers could never quite master the vibrato." She became a journalistic prodigy instead, mastering subjects ranging from grief counseling to the Tae-Bo phenomenon. But Labi, who sang soprano in choir as an undergraduate at Harvard, has not given up on music. "The kids at the school showed such heart, it made me want to pick up the violin again," she says. "Maybe I'll work on that vibrato...
...glut hurts in another key way. It creates well-capitalized competition for companies that have already gone public. This is an underappreciated phenomenon. Each new Internet IPO equips yet another company to steal business from the incumbents. Instead of one online pet store, there are three. That pushes all companies in the same line of enterprise further from the future profits that, to a degree, all Internet investors count...
There is no comparable phenomenon in the U.S. Our fans do not identify with their teams in such a way partly because American team sports are more cerebral and require a degree of skill that is beyond the reach of the layman. Baseball, for instance, requires a bundle of disparate skills: hitting a ball thrown at 90 m.p.h., catching a ball flying at the speed of a bullet, and throwing long distances with great accuracy. Football requires a different set of skills for each of its 11 positions. The U.S. spectator thus finds himself viewing two discrete events: what...
Pele is therefore a different phenomenon from the baseball or football star. Soccer stars are dependent on their teams even while transcending them. To achieve mythic status as a soccer player is especially difficult because the peak performance is generally quite short--only the fewest players perform at the top of their game for more than five years. Incredibly, Pele performed at the highest level for 18 years, scoring 52 goals in 1973, his 17th year. Contemporary soccer superstars never reach even 50 goals a season. For Pele, who had thrice scored more than 100 goals a year, it signaled...
...both categories reported having been involved in a domestic dispute while under the influence of alcohol; about half of those in jail, and a third of those on probation, exhibited signs of alcohol dependency; and both groups experienced high rates of DWI recidivism. The statistics also revealed another significant phenomenon: "Compared to other offenders under correctional supervision," said the bureau, "DWI offenders were more commonly white and male, older and better educated...