Word: habitant
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...some people easily hooked on cigarettes while others drop the habit after a few puffs? The answer, according to a study of 4,775 sets of twins, which was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, may lie in our chromosomes. Identical twins (who share the same genes) were somewhat more likely than fraternal twins (who don't) to exhibit the same behavior -- whether it is chain smoking, rarely smoking or quitting altogether. The study's results bolster the idea that heredity plays a role in why people start, stop or continue smoking...
...habit to speak of Matisse's "assurance," his Apollonian, almost inhuman, balance. Yet this simple idea does not survive the evidence of this show. The deeper one looks, the more doubt and qualification one finds. It was far from Matisse's mind to impose an artificial certainty on the flux of vision. The resolution of his great 1914 still life, Goldfish and Palette, is provisional; on either side of the black central column things teeter and lean; even the curlicues of the black iron balcony seem held in a fragile equilibrium...
CLAIR GEORGE WAS BACK IN WASHington last week, after a Maine vacation where he satisfied his voracious reading habit and worked on his tennis serve. Next month he will be playing for higher stakes as federal prosecutors try to nail him for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra affair. Though the former CIA chief of clandestine operations received a respite three weeks ago when a jury could not reach a verdict on nine counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice, he now faces a retrial at the hands of special prosecutor Craig Gillen. Just...
Especially when venturing into new territory where mere habit will no longer suffice, people require the stabilizing, consoling, instructing influence of other human tales. People without a surrounding atmosphere of myth and example are prone to the stupidity that arises from being isolated and incurious about the nuances of others' experience...
Stannard's chronicle begins with Waugh as a marine officer yearning to fight for king and country. Indubitably brave, he saw little combat, unless one counts his skirmishes with superiors who thought, correctly, that he lacked discipline. As Stannard mildly notes, "Waugh's habit of striding into offices and demanding attention irritated the military bureaucrats." By the time he died of a coronary thrombosis at 63, Brideshead Revisited (published in 1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (completed in 1961) had sealed his reputation as one of the century's great masters of English prose. They had also established...