Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Largely because of the cup rules about the procurement of cloth, design and sail-cutting talent, this year's series, like so many in the past, was anything but the dramatic duel of titans, the mystic mano a mano on the deep that sailors dream of and the New York Yacht Club ritually invokes. The outcome has been virtually certain since the first leg of the first race, when it was discovered that Australia-mainly because of the poor cut of her jibs-could neither point as high nor go as fast to windward as Courageous...
Because the debates among IMF members are necessarily secret, a strange mystique has settled around the Fund. The curious personality of Witteveen-part hard-nosed banker, part mystic (see box) -has only added to the organization's enigmatic reputation. The mystique is undeserved, since the delegates are as subject to emotion and nationalistic impulses as any businessman or politician...
...Austere Mystic...
Hendrikus Johannes Witteveen, 56, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is the most enigmatic international civil servant since the days of Dag Hammarskjeid, the mystic who died in a plane crash while serving as Secretary-General of the United Nations. An economist by training, Witteveen always carries a pocket calculator, which he whips into action during esoteric discussions of international finance. A strict adherent of the obscure Sufi religious cult,* Witteveen, despite the intense pressures of his job, finds time to meditate every morning and evening. He sees no conflict between the practice of the dismal science...
...equate the game in terms of Americana." The result was a fat passel of pseudo-sociological articles that would have warmed the heart of Vance Packard. Only they didn't work. Slowly, Kahn admits, he realized that baseball was one interesting part of American life, but hardly a mystic expression of its inner meaning. Like all fun and games, baseball is best suited to anecdotes, not weighty moralizing, to light yarns rather than weighty parables. No one can explain the game's appeal, and Kahn insists that "You learn to let some mysteries alone, and when you do you find...