Word: descent
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...human drama behind these tidy surfaces: the inability of people to connect, to see the casual cruelty they inflict on others, to come to terms with their failed illusions, to be happy. A woman's spoofy fantasies of a perfect domestic life turn into the chilling symptoms of her descent into madness in Woman in Mind. A charming, well-intentioned "golden couple" manage inadvertently to destroy the lives of nearly everyone they come in contact with in Joking Apart. A holiday boat excursion for two landlubberly married couples turns into a fascist parable in Way Upstream...
...genotypes still showed a genetic diversity that reflected the makeup of the general Caucasian population: Specifically, they exhibited a range of variations on the FTO gene, which previous studies have associated with obesity and high body mass index, or BMI. Experts say about half of all people of European descent possess at least one "heavy" variant of the FTO gene. Within the Amish study group, some volunteers had two copies of a fattening variant; these people were 67% more likely to be obese and were on average 7 lbs. heavier than people without any copies of this form...
...Williams is one of a host of Polynesian players who are shaking up a century-old game in both Australia and New Zealand - and transforming rugby union as well. As recently as the 1980s, players of Maori or Pacific Island descent were rare in the elite ranks of union and league in Australia, and well outnumbered in New Zealand. Broadly speaking, union, amateur until 1995, was the exclusive domain of affluent private-school alumni, while league was the professional game of the white working class. The few Maori or Islander players who broke into the latter were often racially abused...
...large numbers of comparatively slight boys, to the point where more New Zealanders now play soccer than the brutal 15-man game. Driving on Saturdays around Hawkes Bay, on New Zealand's North Island, the former New Zealand rugby league international Kevin Tamati notes that New Zealanders of European descent are all but absent from the rugby fields. "It saddens me," says Tamati, a Maori, of the exodus...
...idolized champions of the 1950s and '60s such as Clive Churchill and Johnny Raper. Nowadays, at 73, Feltis is immersed in the new wave as the boss of junior league at the Penrith Panthers, an NRL club west of Sydney where close to half the youngsters are of Polynesian descent. It's a realm very different from league of old, in which the Islander players routinely gather to pray before matches; in which a coach couldn't connect with his church-going, 14-year-old Polynesian charges until he realized he was offending them with his swearing; and in which...