Word: mason
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chief investment strategist of Legg Mason Capital Management, Michael Mauboussin's job is to understand the world and then make money off of it. What he's found over the years is that investors, like any other group of people, are prone to make mistakes that stem from faulty approaches to decision-making. In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Mauboussin - also an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School - pulls from fields such as psychology, statistics and complexity science to explain how we might do better. TIME's Barbara Kiviat spoke with...
...given an application form to fill out, that's the first thing. You have to be male. The questions include "Do you believe in a supreme being?" It doesn't specify one particular religion, but because of the way the rituals have evolved, it's assumed a Mason is going to have a non-specific belief in a God or deity. It also asks if you've ever been convicted of a serious crime. That is a deal breaker. The main other thing is they want confirmation that you're self-supporting, that you're not joining the Masons...
...book's introduction, you mention how you omitted certain details. The consensus seemed to be that the specific means Masons use to recognize each other - handshakes, the specific wording of parts of the ritual - should not be divulged. You don't want some fake Mason coming to your lodge and talking their way into your meetings...
...note that one of the darkest episodes in Masonic history led to the first-ever third U.S. political party, the Anti-Masonic Party. How did that come about? There was a man named William Morgan who was - and there's some controversy about this - a disaffected Mason who decided to write a book on Masonic degrees. This was in 1826 in upstate New York, the frontier at the time. He was kidnapped and was never heard from after that. It appears that it was a group of Masons who abducted him. And because he was never seen again...
...Professor Langdon). His inner struggle is between his own native academic skepticism and the ever mounting evidence that the world contains something miraculous that said skepticism can't account for. "You, like many educated people, live trapped between worlds," a wise priest (he's also a Mason!) tells him. "One foot in the spiritual, one foot in the physical. Your heart yearns to believe ... but your intellect refuses to permit it." Langdon should get together with Agent Mulder from The X-Files - they'd have a lot to talk about...