Word: specter
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...athlete's battle against time alternates between the immediate and the protracted: one final shot before the buzzer, one last season before the legs give out. How best to handle the specter of inevitable defeat among athletes accustomed to winning is a cause for debate. We balance our admiration for those who walk away at their best (Bobby Jones, Bjorn Borg) with the affection felt for those who soldier on, joints creaking, and displaying a vulnerability to which we can unexpectedly relate (Arnold Palmer, Andre Agassi...
...these insights, of course, make your sputtering memory less frustrating. When you've misplaced your keys for the third time this month, it does you little good to be reminded that it all may be just too much glucose and too few blueberries. And nothing entirely removes the specter of true dementia and the horrors it implies. Still, figuring out how memory works is the most important step in figuring out how it can be fixed. When you can make some of the fixes yourself, the news is even better. If you needed one more reason to get your exercise...
...Associating Obama with Wright's radical views raises the specter of racial stereotyping. Those who impute to Obama radical views about AIDS, Israel or black nationalism are knowingly discounting his stated positions and making assumptions that may be influenced by his race. Just how much of that is going on is hard to measure. But if there's a racial component to voters' abandonment of Obama in the wake of the Wright affair, it's safe to say those voters aren't coming back...
...nursing homes, often alone, the process prolonged by a conspiracy of hope, fear, bureaucracy, inertia. When researchers not long ago interviewed family members of the recently deceased, half of them said their loved one did not get the support he or she needed at the end. There's a specter to haunt us, a death worth fearing, altogether different from the death we can embrace...
...major retrenchment could have serious consequences for China's economy and society. The specter of legions of laid-off migrant workers roaming the streets in search of jobs is bound to keep Beijing's economic policymakers--who fear the political consequences of widespread social unrest--up at night. Sun, the Lehman Brothers economist, says that as manufacturers are pushed to the brink, China's stock markets could see sharp declines. Given that many large, listed Chinese companies pad their profits by investing in stocks themselves, "a big correction could bring [corporate earnings] even lower, and a vicious cycle could result...