Word: contrarian
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...five-year psychological cycle suggests a contrarian strategy: take a hard look at buying what has performed poorly in recent years. The answer today looks to be, as a group, large-capitalization U.S. stocks. The top 10 U.S. firms by market cap as of March 2000 have seen their stocks decline 27% on average through September 2006, while their combined net income has nearly doubled. The market has wrung out most of the 1990s excesses...
...work of fiction for its modernist notions and humanist politics. That wouldn't fit Spillane at all; his novels were, arguably, post-humanist. No tastemaker admitted to enjoying the pulps, though they contained some of the most vigorous writing around. Few critics defended Spillane, even to establish their contrarian credentials by going against the genteel grain. (Spillane's one cheerleader among serious novelists was Ayn Rand, a dogmatic right-winger. That didn't help sway the establishment.) Hammer, who dominated the mass book market in the early '50s as monopolistically as Harry Potter did a half-century later, couldn...
DIED. Arthur Hertzberg, 84, contrarian Jewish scholar and civil rights activist; near Westwood, N.J. After Israel's 1967 Six-Day War, he caused a stir by calling for a Palestinian state. Yet when the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a liberal Roman Catholic priest and peace activist, attacked Israel for "domestic repression," Hertzberg rebuked him for "old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism." Determined to entwine Judaism with social causes, he called the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum the "national cathedral of American Jewry's Jewishness" and suggested Jews expand their focus. Instead of offering "platitudes," he said, "a rabbi should be where the real...
...entrepreneurs, and none has stepped into the icy breach with more foresight than Pat Broe, a Denver-based real-estate and railroad magnate. The press-shy Broe, 58, who describes himself as a junk dealer ("I buy troubled stuff and turn it around," he says), has a history of contrarian investments. When he purchased 807 miles of nationally owned railway stock from the Canadian government for $11 million in 1997, he also picked up, for the token sum of roughly $8, the port of Churchill, Manitoba...
...math Cores I’ve taken are basically bureaucratic in nature. I actually loved the lectures in my Quantitative Reasoning Core (Peter Ellison’s “Counting People”), and I was happy to absorb what I could of my Science A (again, the contrarian in me decided to protest the Core, and so I took Earth and Planetary Sciences 5, which was fascinating, but you can only imagine how well that midterm went). I’m not anti-intellectual, I just don’t like wasting my time—in fact...