Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what the "one thing" and "another" may be. On a psychological level, there are as many preferred diagnoses as diagnosticians. Says Cornell: "Most typically this is in the context of a woman who is severely depressed and may also be suicidal." Indeed, that seems to be the case with Smith. Other doctors are inclined to cite psychosis or postpartum depression. Robert Hazelwood, a former FBI behavioral scientist, relates the case of a woman who became jealous of the attention her husband showered on their infant. She told her husband she was cooking a roast for dinner. When he raised...
...Susan Smith knew what a kidnapper should look like. He should be a remorseless stranger with a gun. But the essential part of the picture -- the touch she must have counted on to arouse the primal sympathies of her neighbors and to cut short any doubts -- was his race. The suspect had to be a black man. Better still, a black man in a knit cap, a bit of hip-hop wardrobe that can be as menacing in some minds as a buccaneer's eye patch. Wasn't that everyone's most familiar image of the murderous criminal...
...turns out, the murderous criminal in the saga of Michael and Alexander Smith looks like an innocuous young white woman with wisps of teased hair. But while her invention failed to save her, Smith was scheming in a long and effective tradition. For centuries men and women have denied their own deadly impulses by recasting them in the features of some unnerving outsider. Depending on the time and place, the villains might be Jews, immigrants, longhairs or blacks, whoever might do as targets for the shared anxieties of the age. In late 20th century America, we keep ourselves supplied with...
...Susan Smith's invention of a black culprit didn't work as well as she had hoped. Her own not-quite-right account of the kidnapping, and perhaps memories of the Stuart case, kept people from rejecting the possibility that the distraught mother was a suspect herself. And though she may not have thought about or cared how her self-serving concoctions would affect race relations around Union, South Carolina, the worst was avoided. Despite the police sketch of a black suspect that papered the area, feelings never boiled over and authorities weren't goaded into harassing the black community...
...irony, of course, is that the layoffs that have bedeviled workers like those at Electric Boat are now providing job opportunities in service industries. Four years ago, accountant Greg Smith, 36, lost his $55,000-a-year position as an audit manager for a food-service firm that trimmed its payroll. After a succession of part-time work and other jobs, Smith joined the consulting firm Grossberg Co. in Maryland last summer as an auditor who sniffs out financial fraud for clients who have pared back their own accounting departments. Today Smith figures that between his salary...