Word: knacks
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...seems then, that my feeling of uneasiness about my questionable knack for putong hua (Chinese for “common language,” Mandarin) is not that I’m seriously handicapped by it. Rather, I’m embarrassed by my ineptitude with a language I’ve spoken since I was born—bothered that there are some parts of my family’s culture that are not naturally inherited but require a conscious effort to understand...
John Travolta is talking about the allure of the classic Hollywood stars-their knack for establishing immediate intimacy with the audience. He mentions Barbara Stanwyck, who played the toughest, smartest broads of the '30s and '40s and who received an honorary Oscar in 1982, presented by Travolta. "If you'd met Stanwyck," he explains, "she would have crushed you with her ability to adore and adorn you, almost like a Southern belle." Then, to the journalist he's met only an hour before, Travolta says, "Stand up." When a movie star of three decades' eminence tells me to rise...
...name designers such as Tom Fazio, Tom Doak, Rees Jones and Ben Crenshaw have all spent time sprucing up older fairways, updating technology and incorporating current golfing trends. Rees (the Open Doctor) Jones, whose nickname refers to his knack for transforming older courses into U.S. Open--worthy playgrounds, says about a third of his projects are fairway refurbishments. "There is a trend now to get away from the modern and build it back in the classical style," says Jones (brother and rival of Robert). He recently remodeled the Highlands Course at the Atlanta Athletic Club...
...builder, a central figure in wrestling an examination of Judaism into America's universities. He accomplished this through brilliance (he developed his own secularly comprehensible synthesis of rabbinics), superhuman productivity (he has written more than 950 books, although he will admit to a certain reprocessing of material) and a knack for grooming gifted protgs who now run Jewish studies at top schools. He is equally famous for alienating many of his disciples with what came to be known as "Neusner's drop-dead letters." (Neusner calls the complaint "overstated.") He can keep friends--Harvard classmate John Updike wrote...
...through his pictures of drama productions. His debut exhibition was unveiled at Prague's Semafor Theatre in 1961, and soon afterward he began contributing to a theater magazine, Divadlo. While this connection to the stage seems arbitrary, it helped define two of his key qualities as a photographer: a knack for instinctively recognizing dramatic intensity in his subjects' lives, and an uncommon ability to observe and record without disturbing the scene being played out before...