Word: unraveler
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...Knight had it all: an Olympic gold medal, two N.C.A.A. championships and an NIT crown. Then came the 1984-85 season. His basketball team, the Indiana Hoosiers, played under .500 in Big Ten competition for the first time in his 14-year reign as coach. Knight began to unravel. He benched his starters, dismissed his leading rebounder and, in a nationally televised game, he flung a chair across the court to protest the officiating. John Feinstein, a canny Washington Post columnist, focuses on the following season, when Knight veered even closer to the edge. Feinstein has no quarrel with...
...well-developed standard for judging the culpability of fiction; libel rulings have been concerned mostly with news reports. Real people have served as models for fictional characters, from Proust's Baron Charlus to Bellow's Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts...
...arms-for-Iran turned into cash-for-the-contras scandal is just beginning to unravel. One sure consequence of that unraveling will be an endless series of disclosures -- names, dates, places, faces -- that will make it very unsafe to be an American agent. For some Americans that will mean the end of a political career. Elsewhere survival has a different meaning. In the early '80s, Israel had, then lost, contacts in the middle levels of the Iranian military. "They died out," said an Israeli official to the New York Times. "I mean that literally. Our contacts were executed...
...staggered by the illogic of Michael Pakaluk's argument against tax funding for abortion. He fails to distinguish between the undesirable role of the state where it imposes its will in "intensely personal matters," and its beneficial role where it facilitates choice in such matters. His argument begins to unravel when he speciously compares the use of public money to facilitate abortion, with its use to facilitate access to a synagogue or church. The risk of pregnancy is an unavoidable, inherent condition of normal adult female life. The risk of not finding the religious facility of one's choice...
Proponents of tax reform know that once the Senate starts making exceptions for one interest group, the whole package will unravel. The best protection against major amendments is the requirement that the bill be revenue neutral: it must neither lose nor raise revenue over a five-year period. Anyone who offers an amendment that costs revenue is virtually obliged to propose another way to make up the lost money. Thus preserving one Senator's sacred cow would mean goring another...