Word: obsessing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hard to say precisely why drugs are this year's public bane, just as it is hard to know why other threats that are ever present -- from nuclear holocaust to world hunger to environmental disaster -- seem to obsess the national consciousness in cycles. Perhaps it is the sheer insidiousness of crack, the newly popular, highly potent form of cocaine that can in short order transform the casual pleasure seeker into an addict. Perhaps it is the perception that drugs have spread into the workplace and the neighborhood, that they have arrived like the wolf at the door, or at least...
...this time the conviction that something was terribly wrong in his native land had begun to obsess him. Eric Blair had experienced injustice and poverty; George Orwell began to look for their causes. The change was not entirely voluntary. He wrote and published novels, and tried to pursue the kind of literary career that had been traditional in England since the 18th century. But the urge to stand witness to his times nagged him out of seclusion: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained unaware of my political loyalties...
Around 12:45 p.m., I returned to the Oval Office unannounced. I owed it to the President to say that his best service to the country now would be to resign. An impeachment trial would preoccupy him for months, obsess the nation and paralyze our foreign policy. It was too dangerous for our country and too demeaning to the presidency. He should leave in a manner that appeared as an act of his choice. Nixon said he appreciated what I said. He would take it seriously...
...zigzagged between the Zu rich of Dada, Lenin and Joyce, and the Vienna of Freud, finally earning a Ph.D. in chemistry. But the young doctor chose literature instead of laboratories. Auto-da-Fé (1935), published on the eve of Hitler's Anschluss, initiated the theme that would obsess Canetti over four decades: how to pay close attention to the world...
...like to conform, and the fever builds first in his belly and then in his head, making him restless like an animal and nervous like a killer. He hates New York with Biblical fury. Its livid neons, the gaudy robes of the pimps, and the twisting, seething shadows obsess him with a vision of hell...