Word: enigma
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...Disproportionately little parody is to be found in current American speech, as distinguished from actions and gestures. Since words are the original home of parody, this may appear to be an enigma. Parody in discourse, as in writing, remains largely an elitist form, while in action and gesture it has become a democratic form. Perhaps parody in its original state is disqualified for democratic adoption by its connotations of intellectuality. To create parody, one must think; to utter buzzwords, only open the mouth and blow...
...House. The low ceiling, dark walls and functional appointments give it the charm of a courthouse conference room. Machines clack away. Top Secret signs festoon the forbidding steel cabinets. Elaborate locks guard the doors and windows. The man who presides over this scene, Richard Allen, is something of an enigma himself. His public image is overshadowed by those of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who preceded him as National Security Adviser. They resided upstairs in grander style and dominated foreign policy. Allen has shrunk the adviser's job to the stature it had with McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy) and Walt...
...ENIGMA OF FELIX...
...Enigma of Felix Frankfurter attempts a full-scale analysis of this outsize paradox of a man. Author H.N. Hirsch, a Harvard government professor, is to be congratulated on his audacity as well as his scholarship. Psychobiography is a risky undertaking; putting a Supreme Court Justice on the couch is downright breathtaking...
...chameleon." His recondite politics is inevitably labeled Florentine in the press. His most recent biographer, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, described him as "ambivalent." Wrote Giesbert: "He is misanthropic and sociable, naive and calculating, sincere and deceitful." In fact, François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand is as much an enigma to the French, who elected him President of the Republic, as he is to the rest of the world...