Darren Everson, in WSJ:

The South is dominating college football like never before, but its ascent isn't just a matter of good coaching. How a population boom and a growing economy have helped turn a regional obsession into a national juggernaut.

From the archive:

In a small town in Japan, Kirie comes upon her boyfriend's father silently videotaping a snail. He seems unaware of her presence and she thinks no more of it.

Later, the man's obsession with spirals becomes more and more bizarre, ending in his suicide in a washing machine which turn his body into a spiral.

Soon other inhabitants become possesed with different forms of spirals, one student seems to be mutating into a snail, another's hair becomes strangely medusa-like.

The entire town becomes possessed.

This is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence. There are many outstanding people at the agency, in both the Directorate of Intelligence and in Operations. The agency's obsession with the intelligence process crushes these people daily. Those who flourish in this environment are those who can sit through long meetings without falling asleep. The people who can peer through the darkness and see the truth are either sucked into the surreal world of modern management or shunted aside.

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

The hulking timbers illustrate Gehry's obsession with "big wood" ... which probably says more about who we are today than it does about ... the occasional burst of pseudomedieval pomp ...

The obsession of parents and policy makers with quantifiable achievement has created a world in which measured results are all that matter.

We are sliding towards an irreversible obsession with totally visual communication.