Word: icon
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...century's foremost woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead was an American icon. On dozens of field trips to study the ways of primitive societies, she found evidence to support her strong belief that cultural conditioning, not genetics, molded human behavior. That theme was struck most forcefully in Mead's 1928 classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. It described an idyllic pre-industrial society, free of sexual restraint and devoid of violence, guilt and anger. Her portrait of free-loving primitives shocked contemporaries and inspired generations of college students--especially during the 1960s sexual revolution. But it may have been too good...
...which oversaw the postwar buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Von Neumann's game theory became a tool to analyze the unthinkable--global nuclear war--and led to the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction," which would shape U.S. strategy for the next two decades. Von Neumann also became an icon of the cold war. Disabled with pancreatic cancer, he stoically continued to attend AEC meetings until his death in 1957. The wheelchair-bound scientist with the Hungarian accent who mathematically analyzed doomsday is said to have been a model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...
MARIO CUOMO: There are other living legends like Ted Williams, Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax, whose remarkable powers as baseball players approximate DiMaggio's. But none of these had the beyond-the-baseball dimension that gave DiMaggio a unique place as a popular icon. Their reputation, their image, is purely baseball. Williams was amazing at bat. Mays was a better hitter, almost as good an all-around player. But the truth is, DiMaggio appears to be irreplaceable...
Last week perennially blond icon Barbie turned 40. On the very same day, perennially blond houseguest Kato Kaelin also turned 40. Eerily, the similarities do not end there...
DIED. YEHUDI MENUHIN, 82, icon of 20th century music and world-renowned humanitarian; of heart failure; in Berlin. A few years after stunning a San Francisco audience at his first major concert at age 7, the prodigy went on to play at Carnegie Hall, where colleagues had to tune his violin for him because his fingers were too small. A New York-born Jew who lived in London, Menuhin was endlessly open-minded--he loved the Beatles and jammed with Ravi Shankar--and was consumed with using his music to promote world peace. Of his 75-year career, which included...