Word: plumbings
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...easy to diagnose such nominal absurdity, but plainly it is epidemic. Already the name thing has inspired the publication of whole books that purport to plumb the "psychological vibrations" of personal names. Dawn and Loretta and Candy are supposed to be sexy, according to Christopher Andersen's The Name Game, and Bart and Mac and Nate are macho. Humphrey is sedentary; so much for Bogart. Anyway Americans have not needed any tracts or theories to get them lunging after catchy handles. One Phoenix mother recently branded her new baby girl with the unforgettable sobriquet Equal Rights Amendment...
Perhaps television cannot be expected to plumb horror any more thoroughly than it did. Could anyone have endured a closer inspection of it? The Holocaust is very nearly unbearable to contemplate. But one senses something wrong with the television effort when one realizes that two or three black-and-white concentration-camp still photographs displayed by Dorf-the stacked, starved bodies-are more powerful and heartbreaking than two or three hours of the dramatization. The last 15 minutes of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which Italian Jews are rounded up to be taken...
...come in the form of a new theory that offers to identify humor with mathematical precision. John Paulos, mathematics professor at Philadelphia's Temple University, has worked out a way to plumb the anatomy of a joke by applying to it a marvelous flight of mathematical wizardry known as the catastrophe theory. It is based on a dazzle of equations so dense not even a child trained in the new math could grasp...
...hard to see how Paul Robeson could be more faithful, more meaningful, more true to Robeson's spirit, without dragging on to the kind of lengths that would be needed to truly plumb the depths of his complex, conflicted personality, or else haranguing the audience with political invective. Neither of which would sell tickets. So, predictably, Paul Robeson simply cashes in on conventions now well established in a recent rash of one-man shows--a recognizable actor in the starring role, plenty of humorous or touching memories, an emphasis on personality rather than on social forces and constraints--in short...
...subject of magazine covers in the months ahead. She is appearing on TV talk shows, New York University has invited her to lecture on female psychology, and the New York Times Magazine has asked her to write an article on female sexuality. So many want to plumb Hite, in fact, that she has decided to turn down a host of suitors, including Penthouse and much of the British press. Says Hite's agent: "Now she wants to be very selective in the things she does...