Word: calling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hugh McColl is what southerners call "a firecracker of a man." He is a tiny stick of dynamite: 5 ft. 6 3/4 in. tall, with a big mouth and a short fuse. Once, deep into a negotiation to grab a billion-dollar bank, he waited for words until an idea materialized somewhere out of that Marine Corps (1957-59) mind, and he unloaded over the phone at the poor gentleman on the other end: "My board is meeting, and we've gone too far. I've got to launch my missiles!" (The not-so-gentlemanly reply, reported later...
Those that don't will be casualties. McColl (who gives crystal hand grenades to prized employees) understood early on that one day banking was going to be like war. Call it semper finance. Says David Chaum, the visionary guru behind DigiCash, a Net-based currency: "What you find in retail banking today is that some banks see themselves as acquirers, and others see themselves as, well, acquirees." On the day the Travelers deal was announced--creating a giant with $42 billion in equity--vice presidents at still independent Goldman Sachs nervously fingered their E-mail with questions about when...
...earn income without forking over a chunk to Uncle Sam. And that means rejiggering the IRS--and quickly. "Digital cash has no boundaries," explains Richard Rahn, president of Novecon Ltd., a technology consulting firm. "The cybermoney revolution makes some forms of tax evasion very easy." And these innovations even call into question the role of the Federal Reserve as arbiter of the nation's money supply. "The more such innovations succeed, the less the public has to rely on central banks as direct sources of exchange media," University of Georgia economics professor George Selgin has written, "This seems...
...stretch of DNA at the very tip of the X chromosome, the chromosome men inherit from their mothers. Three years later, in 1996, Hamer and his collaborators at NIH seconded an Israeli group's finding that linked a gene on chromosome 11 to the personality trait psychologists call novelty seeking. That same year Hamer's lab helped pinpoint another gene, this time on chromosome 17, that appears to play a role in regulating anxiety...
...changed over seven years, mostly because she seesawed from five-day-a-week workouts to none at all. Last November the Manhattan jewelry designer noticed a story about Pilates, a regimen based on stretching exercises. "I had no idea how to even pronounce it," says Bassett of her impulsive call to make an appointment. (It's Puh-lah-tees.) "I just knew...