Word: rituals
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During his first visit to Harvard in November 1959, Le Corbusier was struck by the sudden beauty of a flood of students on intersecting pathways between class periods. This hourly ritual became the basis for the spiral-shaped ramp that appears in the first sketch of what would become the Carpenter Center. This was to be a means of passing through the building as well as “une route touristique” [tourist route], and the diagonal movement of students was to be prompted by bells installed within the building...
...Marines killed in Lebanon in 1983, the crew of the space shuttle Challenger and the casualties of Panama and Grenada all passed through for publicized ceremonies attended by politicians and widows. Then, at the start of the first Gulf War in January 1991, the Pentagon barred media from the ritual. Critics speculated that the White House wanted to avoid the embarrassment it suffered two years earlier, when networks showed coffins returning from Panama in a split screen beside President George H.W. Bush joking with reporters at a news conference about the invasion. In announcing the ban, the Pentagon cited...
Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing remains "Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw," followed by Rangoon's most famous address "54 University Avenue" and a telephone number. The number never seems to work. When I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her third stint under house arrest since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name in the book always seems both extraordinary and reassuring...
...become a ritual. Each Friday hundreds of young, impoverished Shi'ite men would pile into beat-up Kia minibuses in a Baghdad slum known as Sadr City. They would travel the 90-mile highway to the holy city of Kufa to lay their prayer mats inside the mosque, jockeying for a spot as close to the podium as possible. Whenever the white car carrying their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, came into view, the scene would turn into pandemonium. Bodyguards with Kalashnikov ma-chine guns would struggle to carve out a path so al-Sadr could reach a platform beneath...
...good showing at next week’s Boston Marathon. Well, at least for the first 400m. That’s how long the band of naked sprinters logged in their frenzied sprint around the perimeter of the Quincy courtyard in what has become a Tuesday morning (4 a.m.) ritual performed by the naked, conscious and oddly energetic among Quincy’s student bodies. With little other than their manhood and dignity to weigh them down, the Quincy 400 boys made an impressive showing, though still came in a distant second to Bianca E. Richmond...