Word: conceptions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Literary theorists are fond of saying that every text has its own ideal reader, the person for whom the text is most relevant and evocative. Who is the plan file's ideal reader? It's often hard to say--the very concept of a plan file is so steeped in irony, so full of wink-wink suggestion, that its purpose can be easily obscured. In one sense, a plan file is like a calling card, announcing your position and social status to whoever wants to call on you. Since anyone can finger your account, a plan file is theoretically written...
...guns can look like real guns," she claims. Not if they're fluorescent-colored and loaded with large sponges. "Simulated stalking looks very much like real stalking," she warns. But real stalking--for Harvard students, at least--is usually done in Unix. Or maybe Nathans is concerned with the concept of "killing." No fear, the game could be modeled after Pforzheimer's game of Gotchal, where students "tag," not "shoot...
...baffled by the concept that one should be ruled by one's passions, which are unstable, irrational and often contrary to one's moral and social duties. No culture in history has valued romantic love like our own, and yet there is every indication that this has not made for happier families or for more selfless individuals. The ancient Romans had the motto dux vitae ratio ("reason is the guide of life"). The claim that love can justify anything amounts to unconditional surrender before our own fickle passions and to the rejection of everything that moral thought should stand...
From his earliest writings on Bismarck and Metternich to the final chapter of this final volume of his 3,769-page trilogy of memoirs, Kissinger has remained true to his realist tilt. "The United States," he concludes, "must temper its missionary spirit with a concept of the national interest and rely on its head as well as its heart in defining its duty to the world...
...anthropologist Helen Fisher's The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Will Change the World (due from Random House in May). But it's Angier, who has already won a solid reputation (and a Pulitzer Prize) at her day job, who most decisively lifts the concept of the human female out of its traditional oxymoronic status. You gotta love a self-described "female chauvinist sow" who writes like Walt Whitman crossed with Erma Bombeck and depicts the vagina as a "Rorschach with legs." Woman: An Intimate Geography is a delicious cocktail of estrogen and amphetamine designed...