Word: knowingly
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...attention to the weather's moods and the people who predict them. Americans have become chronic weather junkies. They monitor it the way a hypochondriac listens to his own breathing and heart-beat in the middle of the night. Some people, of course, have an urgent need to know: boatmen, farmers, construction workers, streetwalkers. But others whose daily exposure to the hazards of the open air is limited to three minutes between bus stop and office lobby are also curious to the point of vague anxiety about variations in the temperature and the chances of rain...
...criticism is essentially unfair; people want to know about the weather, and TV forecasters tell them-not just the niggardly name, rank and serial number of temperature highs and lows but also the larger meteorological events: cold sweeping down from Canada, a warm front out of the Gulf Stream or the metastasis of a storm from Martinique. It may sometimes sound like a cheerful patter of mumbo jumbo and Celsius conversions, like a lounge comedian who did a semester at M.I.T., but on the whole, people learn what they want to know. The audience pays weathercasters the compliment...
...weathercasts really necessary? Not absolutely. But in a nation of highly mobile and widely scattered people, it is both a comfort and a convenience to see the national weather satellite pictures, to watch the migrant storms and bright patches mar bling the land, and know just what kind of weather friends and family are under. An intelligent forecast enables people to plan their lives a little, instead of passively awaiting the atmosphere's surprises. Foreknowledge mitigates the tyranny of nature...
Obsessive weather monitoring, in any case, is an old American custom. Thomas Jefferson was mysteriously compulsive about the weather. He kept interminable logs of changes in the temperature. He knew what millions in the weathercasters' audiences may sense: if you know what the weather (a primal force in the world) is up to, you are somehow, obscurely but actually, in control...
...crossroads. With relatively inexpensive imports keeping a lid on prices and a considerable portion of capital outlays diverted into nonproductive environmental controls, the industry cannot raise the money to build the efficient plants it must have to compete with foreign steel. Management, labor and the Government know it, and they are finally in agreement that steps must be taken now to harden and sharpen steel...