Word: secretiveness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shark Week, then, might be a metaphor for living in our media environment: to spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor...
...tells her story in the first person, is a difficult infant whose frustrated parents try her out in the water. "I kick; it moves me, and I feel joy," she says, which is the simple secret of her eventual success. Until then, she's stuck in the trappings of a tearjerker minibiopic: in small-town Kansas with a sister dying of Hodgkin's disease, a mother and father in emotional retreat and a Catholic school full of nuns who have no respect for the art of the 200 free...
Since Dwight Eisenhower evicted the South Lawn squirrels tearing up his putting green, every President but Jimmy Carter has been a golfer. John Kennedy was known for low scores and a graceful swing. Ronald Reagan, whose scores were a state secret, putted down the aisle of Air Force One. Bill Clinton established a reputation for fudging his score - cheating, some said - in rounds with campaign donors while chewing an unlit cigar on the tee. George W. Bush played the way his father H.W. did, like a race against time, until the last years in office, when the son banned himself...
After a time, Obama steps away, and Biden reaches for his wedge. The ball miraculously splits the trunks and bounds onto the green, less than 20 feet from the pin. Amid the caravan of golf carts, including those of the Secret Service detail, a doctor and the ever present nuclear-code-toting military aide, there is an eruption of applause. "Calm under pressure," Obama calls out, bequeathing to Biden his own most valued attribute. "That's why he's my Vice President...
...secret that stress isn't good for you. But what's less clear is how social stressors like a high-pressure job or a failing marriage affect your physical well-being...