Word: secte
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Take Calvin Trillin. Please. At the very least, take his book, a thoroughly diverting novel that nips at the unexposed flanks of the newsmagazine process, particularly the so-called back of the book, where a new sect or fad is no news until the magazine's editors/correspondents discover it. There is, for example, the "dirty bushes" story involving a gardener who prunes shrubs into phallic and vaginal shapes. And the quixotic "two-thirds stocking" fad, where the only stumbling block for the writer is what two-thirds means -two-thirds of the way to the knee or just...
...Iraqi military in 1958. Hafez Assad's Syria has negotiated a phony "merger" with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, even though Gaddafi until recently was suspected of financing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an underground organization dedicated to the assassination of Assad's fellow Alawites, members of a minority Muslim sect that controls the Damascus regime, and in 1976 Gaddafi sent his guerrillas into Lebanon to fight alongside Palestinians against the Syrian army...
...buys the Los Angeles house of Buddhist Monk Ariya Dhamma Thera, 74, and his arthritic wife Georgia, 84. Thera, whose mother was Indian and father half-Scottish, was born Benjamin Martin Marshall in Bombay, but he changed his name when he became a member of a Buddhist sect. After moving to Los Angeles, he opened the American Institute of Buddhist Studies (he translates his new name as "teacher of the noble truth"). From lectures and private lessons, he amasses a small fortune...
Between what is almost certainly true about Madame H.P. (for Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky and what is almost certainly false, there is a perilous region of mists and myths. The dominant truth about H.P.B. was that she founded and was chief illusionist for the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist sect that influenced the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the thinking of Jawaharlal Nehru, and helped to revive the consciousness of India...
...movement has also produced a variant sect of soft-core survivalists. They share the more moderate belief, long held by Mormons, that it is only prudent to have a year's store of food on hand in case of pestilence or famine. Their grand sachem is Howard Ruff, 49, devout Mormon, professional pessimist and author of How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years (2.5 minion copies sold). Ruff is the economic evangelist behind Ruff Hou$e, a half-hour syndicated television show that preaches to 2 million viewers every week the benefits of investing in hard goods, gold...