Word: inborn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What then was the secret of Edison's inventiveness? The core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized...
...born this way. It hardly matters. Because everything that is successful in local politics, a big first-name constituency, the ability to make people smile and think you are someone who'll listen to their worries, the ready handshake and the meaningful wink, seem to have been inborn or ingrained in Al, and it all works to his benefit. (I had a dream the other night in which Al figured prominently. I dreamt that, when he was born 61 years ago in East Cambridge, where he still lives, the infant Al Vellucci raised his hand to stop the attending midwife...
...baggy pants, a workshirt with cut-off sleeves, a leather jacket, and a floppy, oversized woolen ski cap that he periodically pulls over his eyes, throws in the air, or loses among the tangle of amp and guitar cords on stage--he looks like a kid who has some inborn style but doesn't have the time or money or desire to get properly duded up. The lighting for the act also helps to create this image: during some songs, the stage is hazily backlit, giving the impression that Springsteen is hanging out on a corner under a street-lamp...
...precludes the development of any culture worthy of the name. He then focuses on other nomads who domesticated only one animal - the horse - and turned it into the basis of a new and terrible art, that of warfare. Bronowski is critical of ethologists who insist that man has some inborn instinct for organized violence. War, he says, is nothing but "a highly planned cooperative effort of theft," rationalized by "the predator posing as hero." Cultures that live by the sword alone "can only feed on the labors of other men." They inevitably die, often because they are absorbed...
Fogel and Engerman blame it on the racism of most Americans, an often unconscious racism that makes them take black people's weakness for granted and restrict themselves to trying to explain it as an inborn quality or, for the more liberal, as a consequence of oppression. In their epilogue, Fogel and Engerman say they wrote Time on the Cross to attack this view and to show that even under slavery, black people were among the most accomplished and admirable people in the United States, "to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without...