Word: humanities
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...return to Manhattan after five years in gilded Hollywood, told readers of the New York Times why he was back: ". . . Is it still news that a Hollywood movie is usually born on the stone floor of a bank? And that this celluloid dragon, scorching to death every human fact in its path, must muscle its way back to its natal cave, its mouth full of dimes and nickels? . . . The Hollywood film exists only as the celebration of cold, canny (not so canny!) investment, with the resultant desire to make every movie as accessible as chewing gum, for which no more...
Both techniques, says Father White, are valid means of combating two forms of evil - one called sin and one called psychoneurosis. "But the evil with which each is concerned is essentially different, even mutually opposed. Sin is denned as an evil human act . . . malum culpae -'the evil men do' ... A psychoneurosis, on the contrary, is a certain malum poenae - an 'evil men suffer' or 'undergo' . . . Confession presupposes the power to sin and to turn from sin and seek forgiveness ; analysis usually presupposes necessity and impotence...
John Reed, who later became a Soviet saint, rides on a raid with Pancho Villa (1914) and turns in a story that is half good fast Western, half a discussion of human liberty. In the same manner, H. L. Mencken ignores most of the who, what & when of the courtroom testimony in the Scopes evolution trial (1925) and tells the why of the trial in the mores of the backward, superstition-ridden hill folks...
Died. Dr. Franz Weidenreich, 75, famed German-born anthropologist; in Manhattan. His research on Asiatic skull fossils led to a revolutionary theory that modern man was descended from a giant rather than a pygmy predecessor. Aided by discoveries of Dr. Ralph von Koenigswald, he revamped the chronology of human evolution, placed the huge Gigantopithecus (450-550,000 years old) as man's earliest known ancestor...
Died. Ildebrando ("Papa") Zacchini, 80, Italian-born circus impresario who introduced the human cannon ball act in 1922; in Tampa, Fla. Patriarch of two generations of the often injured but never killed "Flying Zacchinis" (the stunt has led 32 non-Zacchinis to their deaths), Ildebrando lost a leg seven years ago, after he had already retired to devote himself to painting...