Word: tactic
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Nevertheless, the prejudice that we most firmly share with Luce and Hadden is a fundamental optimism. For them, optimism--a faith in progress--was not just a creed, it was a tactic for making things better. The challenges of a new millennium as well as today's fin-de-siecle scandals require that reporters be skeptical. But we must avoid the journalistic cynicism--as a pose, as a sophomoric attitude--that reigned in the '70s and '80s. Intelligent skepticism can, and should, be compatible with a basic belief in progress and a faith in humanity's capacity for common sense...
When this tactic fails to work, as it did that night, one must change the subject of conversation so that he or she does not recede into the netherworld in which all other hours are (or should be) spent. Those other hours seem to be most typically spent in students' rooms in front of (blank) computer screens. (Well, we do check e-mail, and often...
...option would be to cast doubt on Lewinsky's own credibility. That can be done gently, by depicting her as a cornered victim of Starr's ruthless investigation--or not so gently, by playing up the idea that she's inventing or exaggerating details of their relationship. But that tactic runs the risk of appearing to victimize Lewinsky all over again. In a scandal in which much of the political fallout will center on who's taking advantage of women, the all too warm Clinton or the all too chilly Starr, that's one more tricky path...
...very apprehensive," he says. "I was waiting for it to come--and it didn't." But another pandemic, he believes, is inevitable. He has given his wife instructions on what to do to survive it: retreat to their mountain cabin until the onslaught passes. It was a tactic, he knows, that was successfully used in 1918 by a village just 30 miles from Brevig. Its elders, after learning of the advancing plague, stationed armed guards at the village perimeter with orders to shoot anyone who tried to enter. The village survived unscathed...
This past November, I finally broke the restraints of my collegiate exile with a trip to Foxwoods Resort and Casino. I hit the blackjack tables, that corner of the casino where so many poor souls hand over their paychecks. I proceeded to employ a tactic whereby I doubled my bet every time that I lost a hand. This approach is derisively known as "chasing a loss," and based on the structure of the casino's betting limits, it is statistically guaranteed to bankrupt the player--unless that player is extraordinarily lucky. And lucky...