Word: peculiarities
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...memorial to Adolph Saanwald imply an endorsement of Hitler. Even the slowest tourist has more sophistication than that, and to imply that future generations of Harvard students would be confused at the sight of such a memorial to the Confederate dead and think it Harvard's endorsement of the "peculiar institution," certainly doesn't credit the future with much intelligence. The fact that other institutions have managed to commemorate their dead on both sides of the Civil War has not served to confuse their students or alumni as to where the institution stood in the conflict...
There are two good ways to become famous in America. One is to possess rare genius or, at the very least, an appreciable talent. The usual suspects come to mind: Hemingway, Gershwin, Hopper. Another is to appeal to a particular cultural neurosis, a peculiar demographic phenomenon. It was the latter which brought the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe more fame than he ever could have imagined and, in the eyes of many, more fame than he ever deserved...
Forget about social history. Though any post-Marxist pedant can wring out the usual insights about patriarchy and property in 17th century Dutch bourgeois life, none of them touch on the peculiar magic of Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married...
...more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. "What Darwin described in the Origin of Species," observes Queen's University paleontologist Narbonne, "was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods - and that...
Ptashne, the Smith professor of molecular biology, says he doesn't know whether his musical talents help him in his scientific research, but he notes that few scientists have such a "peculiar" lifestyle...