Word: paradox
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Unknown brands are something of a paradox because the oil in the engine of fashion is the brand. How can fashions become fashion when people don't know what it is that they should be lusting after? And where does that leave the big brands and their multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, boutiques and celebrity designers? Many have responded by acquiring the smaller brands, a trick they learned from the beauty business, in which the conglomerate Estee Lauder, for example, bought out M.A.C. and Bobbi Brown in the mid-'90s. Between December 2000 and July 2001, the Gucci Group snapped...
Also, don't count on the I'll-let-you-get-off-the-phone-now gene--or any other single gene with a large behavioral effect--being identified anytime soon. Behavioral genetics has uncovered a paradox. Studies that measure similarities among twins and adoptees reliably show strong effects of sharing a large group of genes. The outcome is so reliable that behavioral geneticists now speak of the First Law of their field: that all behavioral traits are partly heritable. But studies that try to isolate a single gene for a behavioral trait have been fickle; many of putative genes...
...drug, Levitra, ready to come on the market this year, which is touted as the next Viagra. The prize is almost certainly worth billions in sales. But with a potential payday like that, why is Bayer getting out - and why have no suitors jumped in yet? That's the paradox across the drug industry: pharmaceutical companies are among the most profitable legal businesses in the world, and employ some 520,000 people in Europe. And yet the sector has been behaving lately as if it were in a sharp downturn. The battle for control of Bayer is just the latest...
...ultimate paradox, the teams that supposedly best represent the amateur idea—sports without any material reward—wind up entertaining the issue most saddeningly reminiscent of the professional ranks: contraction...
...means to sustain it--especially the essential consolations of serious reading--wither away. In tones that are sober but never lugubrious, Franzen weighs the pressures upon the self in a culture that manages the neat trick of discouraging real solitude and genuine community, substituting for both the paradox of media-overloaded isolation. "The first lesson reading teaches," he writes, "is how to be alone...