Word: masterful
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...well-born wastrels, among them Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse introduced a valet named Jeeves. He paired the two to solve plot problems in The Man With Two Left Feet (1917), and the rest is history. To the many theories about the characters' origins, McCrum insightfully adds: "The cunning servant?foolish master has been a staple of comedy since classical times, and Wodehouse certainly knew his Plautus and his Terence." By the 1920s, magazines like Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post would pay up to $35,000 to serialize a Wodehouse novel. At the dawn of the Depression, he had a Mayfair...
...finally worked out the double-helical shape of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. IN DNA'S FAMED SPIRAL-STAIRCASE STRUCTURE ARE HIDDEN THE MYSTERIES OF HEREDITY, OF GROWTH, OF DISEASE AND AGING ... As the basic ingredient of the genes in the cells of all living organisms, DNA is truly the master molecule of life. [The discovery] was one of the great events in science, comparable to the splitting of the atom or the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species...
...ever quite sure where al-Sadr stands. The rebellious Shi'ite cleric is a master of the mixed message, and last week he flipped so often between vows of violence and offers to negotiate that even when the two-week-old standoff between his Mahdi Army and combined U.S. and Iraqi-government forces seemed about to end, it wasn't clear if it had. Did he really intend to quit the shrine? Or was he actually planning to resume combat, as he later urged his followers, against the enemy forces still poised outside? As one of his spokesmen, Sheik Ahmed...
That makes perfect sense to Leonard Poon, director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Center. Since 1988 he has studied American centenarians--he calls them "expert survivors"--and compared them to people in their 80s ("master survivors") and to relative youngsters in their 60s. Poon found that out of 16 personality traits, the experts exhibited four coping mechanisms. First, he says, "centenarians are more dominant. They want to have their way," and they are not easily pushed around. Many are characterized by "suspiciousness. They do not take information on the superficial level" but will question an issue and think...
...There are days when I want to just scream from the rooftops, 'How did this happen and why?'" Kabat says. "I've become a master at learning how to count to 10 when I get angry. But I don't have much choice except to behave with as much integrity and character as I can, because even though the marriage failed, we can make the divorce succeed, especially where the children are concerned...