Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like cartographers mapping the ancient world, scientists over the past three decades have been laboriously charting human DNA. Of the estimated 100,000-odd genes that populate the genome, just 4,550 have been identified. And only 1,500 of those have been roughly located on the various chromosomes. The message of the genes has been equally difficult to come by. Most genes consist of between 10,000 and 150,000 code letters, and only a few genes have been completely deciphered. Long segments of the genome, like the vast uncharted regions of early maps, remain terra incognita...
...last month's Grammy Awards, that was more than enough to earn them an odd coupling of both jazz and gospel prizes. They are also up for six Gospel Music Association awards next month. The sextet appeared out of nowhere in 1988 with an impeccable debut album (titled Take 6) that inspired hallelujahs from the likes of jazzman Quincy Jones. Coming up in 1989: a second album, a video with Stevie Wonder, a 36-date tour with Al Jarreau, album backup for Johnny Mathis and a sound-track tune for filmmaker Spike...
...recognition that writing did not leave the author protected from the world after all. "Celebrity," he writes, "is a mask that eats into the face." Updike uneasily recalls his much publicized refusal, during the 1960s, to oppose U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a stance that left him odd man out among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority was the Shillington High School faculty, my father and his kindly and friendly, rather wan and punctilious colleagues, with whose...
Replacing the 10-odd Gen Ed course requirements split between the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, the Core introduced the notion of teaching "approaches to knowledge" in more specific areas including foreign studies, the arts, and "social and philosophical" reasoning. The Core's philosophy has been translated by administrators to mean non-departmental courses focusing not so much on facts as analysis, not so much on teaching a distribution requirement as teaching a "form of inquiry...
...least odd aspect of the affair is that Foucault's Pendulum is not so much a thriller as a complicated parable that contains pages and pages of erudite details about such medieval phenomena as the Knights Templar, the Cathars and the Order of Assassins. And Eco steadfastly refuses to explain what his mysterious novel is all about. "This was a book conceived to irritate the reader," he says in his drafty university office, lighting up another of the 60 cigarettes he puffs every day. "I knew it would provoke ambiguous, nonhomogeneous responses because it was a book conceived to point...