Word: axioms
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...central axiom is that if one burrows deep enough beneath the Mao jacket, the shapka or the chador, one discovers that people everywhere are essentially the same. American Anthropologist Samantha Smith was invited to Moscow by Yuri Andropov for firsthand confirmation of just that proposition (a rare Soviet concession to the principle of on-site inspection). After a well-photographed sojourn during which she took in a children's festival at a Young Pioneer camp (but was spared the paramilitary training), she got the message: "They're just . . . almost . . . just like us," she announced at her last Moscow...
Brain damage is forever, or so doctors once thought, but that longstanding medical axiom is now being proved wrong. In laboratories across the U.S. and Europe, researchers are finding that by creating the right chemical environment, and in some cases implanting new cells in the brain, damaged nervous systems can be coaxed to regenerate. Even more encouraging is the discovery, so far shown only in animals, that cellular regrowth can restore lost mental functions, and, in addition, improve memory and learning...
That democracy remains in office; the custom of the sharpened axiom continues. Elizabeth Bowen's "Memory is the editor of one's sense of life" is a Shakespearean perception; Peter De Vries' "Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign that something is eating us" belongs with the best of the Edwardians. Hannah Arendt's observation compresses the century down to a sentence: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent...
...less promising prospect for theatrical adaptation could hardly be imagined; it is difficult even to conceive of what convinced the mainstage selection committee to lavish a coveted slot and budget on so ill-conceived a venture. And in viewing the results, one is reminded, sadly, of the mathematical axiom that zero, no matter how many times, multiplied, can never equal anything but zero. A typical verse from any of Maurice Sendak's clever, malicious little tours de force--take "Stir it once, stir it twice, stir it chicken soup with rice"--means virtually nothing, and therein lies its charm. Blow...
...sweet scene every day galled Hilly but delighted Cooney. "Little kids are the best part of being a celebrity," he said, bouncing a squirmy set of twin babies. "What good is this doing us?" Hilly fumed. As for the pretty girls, Cooney, a bachelor, regretfully subscribes to the boxing axiom that women have ruined more men than war and pestilence. He talks daily by telephone to one young lady friend recuperating from an automobile accident. But for months he has been celibate, admiring the poolside bikinis only from a distance. When he went swimming with a girl...