Word: arcana
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...debate involves some of the most obscure arcana in the tax code: interest capitalization, mirror loans and Section 351 Transfers, to name a few. But here are some guideposts...
Among other arcana, much less susceptible to understanding than the B.C.C.I. scandal, is the question that plagues cosmologists: How did the universe grow into its present form? Did it all start with the Big Bang, or the Great Void? The Great Attractor, or the Great Wall? Science writer Michael D. Lemonick follows this adventure of discovery in The Light at the Edge of the Universe (Villard), which will be published next month. While the answers still elude cosmologists, Lemonick's chronicle draws us compellingly into these mysteries. Together with his colleagues, he demonstrates how responsible journalism can create...
...prospect of multiplying today's TV listings has launched a furious debate over what a fragmented and TV-anesthetized society will do with 100 - or 500 - offerings. Will scores of narrowcast channels devoted to arcana like needlepointing or fly fishing fracture whatever remains of a mass $ culture, leaving Americans with little common ground for discourse? Or will the slots be given over to endless rebroadcasts of a handful of hit movies and TV shows - raising the nightmarish specter of the Terminator saying "I'll be back" every few minutes...
...political wheeler-dealer who was Bill Clinton's surprise choice to be U.S. Trade Representative, Kantor had little experience in the acronymic arcana of GATT and NAFTA and other trade agreements. Yet he has proved a remarkably quick study, in the manner of a crack litigator mastering a complex brief. He is, by training and nature, an aggressive lawyer and lobbyist. Kantor sees himself not as a peacemaker but as a warrior who, as he puts it, "hates to lose." (Those who beat him at tennis have learned to watch out for his flying racquet.) He has represented migrant farmworkers...
Relying in part on sources never before made available to the public, Gleick explains with crystal clarity the paradoxes of quantum physics -- a subject that Feynman himself said nobody understands -- just as he laid bare the arcana of higher mathematics in his 1987 best seller, Chaos. Gleick also uncovers some of the forces that created a man who could devotedly nurse his first wife as she lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium a few miles from the wartime Manhattan Project, where he worked, yet later in life could make a sport out of picking women up in bars...