Word: rebuilding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...puckish glee as he toyed with the ironies of being Governor of all the people. At a recent gubernatorial staff meeting, Dukakis joked that he imagined himself in the Oval Office telling Fred Salvucci, his current transportation secretary, that the ambitious plans to use federal funds to rebuild Boston's central artery would have to be scaled back because "Los Angeles needs the money...
Their slightly more scientific brethren, known as sociologists, would pin the blame instead on broken homes, bad education, two-career families, and the premature influence of the sex-filled mass media. The diagnoses of both sociologists and moralists imply that we need to rebuild teens' social environments to condition young adults better. This is not a constructive recommendation, because it rests on the assumption of moral or social decay. Claiming that things were better in the good old days gets us nowhere...
...further out are general-knowledge systems that would not be limited to a specific function or even a preset agenda but would instead be able to respond appropriately to unexpected tasks and problems. To develop such systems, a rebel generation of AI scientists believes that it is necessary to rebuild their field from the ground up. Their emphasis, says Philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University, is on figuring out how people manage to accomplish the plain, everyday things that account for most human behavior, rather than on creating a mathematical model of the intellect, as an older generation...
...fortune. Somers' sister and two brothers all followed their father in alcoholism. But the real point of this grim but touching account is that parents and siblings, the drinkers and those who stoically enabled others to drink, eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon and were able to rebuild their sense of self and family. "Understanding brought relief and clarification," Somers concludes. "Even if the rest of your family doesn't get better...
...Nitze threw himself into the great debates of the past half-century over how America should use its power and cope with its enemies. He is one of the last of a breed of patrician policymakers who, immediately after World War II, helped rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and defend it by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And last week Nitze, who turns 81 in January, hovered in the background like the spirit of summits past...