Word: famousness
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...directness. His call to arms against the plight of the homeless in the bitter winter of 1954, after a woman froze to death in Paris with her eviction notice in hand, remains one of the most broadly cited expressions of human compassion in the French language. Once he became famous, he was happy to embarrass those who honored him into taking real action. In 1992 he was named a Grand Officer in the French Legion of Honor, but refused to wear the insignia until the government found a humane solution for the plight of 300 African families who had been...
What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain...
...Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios...
...when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11...
...helped Hong Kong remain a force in international commerce. "Rather than being a follower, we're leading the trends," says Peter Solomon, chief executive of Linmark Group, a Hong Kong-- based supply-chain-management company. Someone--someplace--has to be globalization's enabler. Turns out, it's that famous barren rock in the South China...