Word: ritualization
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Once a year, as another December gives way to a chill January, Chief Justice John Roberts rereads a poem published in 1749 by the great writer, moralist and late-night conversationalist Samuel Johnson. Roberts began the ritual in the 1970s as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was one of many students taught to revere Johnson by the master biographer Walter Jackson Bate...
...sets out with his Iraqi translator into the darkness toward the crowded main street of Musayyib, a ramshackle Shi'ite town set along the Euphrates River some 40 miles south of Baghdad. Robed men are gathered in clusters on benches and around tables brought out after the daily ritual of breaking the 12-hour Ramadan fast. As his platoon fans out into the shadows on both sides of the road, Vansandt strides toward the nearest knot of men beneath a sagging string of bare light bulbs, greeting them confidently with "asalaam ilikem" - peace be upon...
...Seinfeld is getting ready for a different sort of ancient ritual: stand-up comedy. "It's kind of that feeling before an ocean swim," he says of facing an audience armed with nothing but jokes. "You know it's gonna be cold at first, but once I get in, it's really fun. And you never know what the waves are going to be like...
...This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that - in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention - would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience...
...sing Happy Birthday to Italian horror auteur Dario Argento, as they did this year. Or, in 2005, to rise and cheer for Hong Kong martial-arts star Sammo Hung. When he strode onstage the people at the Ryerson practically levitated. Ambitiously titled, Midnight Madness is now an annual ritual that always lives up to its name...