Word: greekness
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Stephanopoulos was no slouch as a student either. The son of a dean in the Greek Orthodox Church, he attended Columbia University, where he won his Rhodes. His career in politics was precocious. Starting out as a congressional aide, Stephanopoulos became a deputy communications director for the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign, where he banged out the political message of the day. After the Dukakis debacle, Stephanopoulos almost left politics for a key job helping run the New York City Public Library before Congressman Richard Gephardt, now House majority leader, offered him a top staff position. Recruited last summer, Stephanopoulos pressed...
...accountant's son who excelled in Greek and Latin in college during the German occupation, Montagnier is no stranger to adversity. He faced it again in 1990, when he supported a controversial theory that mycoplasma, a bacterium-like organism, is the trigger that turns a slow-growing population of AIDS viruses into mass killers. According to Montagnier, the explosion of sexual activity in the U.S. during the 1970s fostered the spread of a hardy, drug-resistant strain of mycoplasma. HIV, meanwhile, lay dormant in Africa. The AIDS epidemic began, Montagnier speculates, when the two microbes got together, perhaps in Haiti...
...prize was not gold, silver or bronze, just a simple olive wreath from the sacred tree outside the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. But those leaves were the sole prize; there was no concept of place and show -- only winning. Contestants cried, "The wreath or death!" In fact, the Greek word for contest, agon, has become rather painful in English. But the rewards of victory were enormous: places of honor, money, sinecures and the admiration of nonathletes -- a word in Greek, idiotai, that has also survived in one form in English. Get thee to a gymnasium quickly...
...first beneficiary of flinging open the gates is the historical truth: amateurism has long been portrayed as part of the heritage of the ancient Greek Games. The tie with the past, though, was completely spurious. The Greeks had no concept of amateurism. For them, an Olympic competitor was a city's champion, who was supported while he trained and then was richly rewarded for his victory...
Partly, at least, this is because it gives such sharp vignettes of cultural crossing. Islam the Destroyer is a myth; in fact, much of what we know of classical Greek thought was preserved by Arab scholars, without whose efforts we would know little or nothing of Aristotle. In science, Europe until the 14th century was illiterate compared with the Arab world, and a group of exquisitely made brass instruments in this show reminds one that the universal astrolabe was invented in al-Andalus around...