Word: behavior
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Babe Ruth died, and true grief dropped into public bathos; a coal miner's daughter nicknamed "Bobo" married into the Rockefeller clan; Manhattan's nickel subway fare went to a dime; the year's most popular book on human behavior was by a zoologist named Kinsey...
...were guilty of disturbing the peace: Nicaragua for helping Costa Rican exiles launch the abortive invasion; Costa Rica for harboring the international Caribbean Legion, dedicated to the overthrow of dictatorial regimes in Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. The two quarreling neighbors were warned to be on their best behavior; for good measure, the council ordered a five-man military mission to oversee the troubled frontier...
...Leninist-Marxists before him were out to evolve a "science" of revolutions, a way of charting the ups & downs of social systems. This is not quite on a par with the science of physics, but it is at least parallel to, say, the Dow theory of stockmarket behavior. Some stock traders look to the Dow theory to tell them when to buy or sell. Stalin and the other Marxists wanted a theory that would tell them when a "break" was likely in the Imperialist Front. They kept their eye glued to "the material life of society." The big thing...
...actress lost her job but she didn't seem very depressed about it. When Sam Goldwyn fired her after she had pleaded illness in postponing a New York publicity junket ("the day is over when stars can get away with this sort of behavior"), Teresa Wright said she would never sign another standard "archaic . . . and . . . absurd" movie contract, because it treated actors like cattle. The exchange of unpleasantries happily coincided with a new Goldwyn picture called Enchantment (see below), starring Teresa Wright...
...destroying the fertility of the land. Poet Thomas Merton, now a Trappist monk, lent poetic excitement to his autobiographical account of a worldly young pagan's conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite of its statistical dullness, and gave rise to more bad jokes and pseudoscientific claptrap than any book in recent years...