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wildrose800331UID: 2602131

公众人物 媒体类
Times

What was it about Diana, Princess of Wales, that brought such huge numbers of people from all walks of life literally to their knees after her death in 1997? What was her special appeal, not just to British subjects but also to people the world over? A late spasm（一阵，痉挛） of royalism hardly explains it, even in Britain, for many true British monarchists（君主主义者） despised her for cheapening the royal institution by behaving more like a movie star or a pop diva than a princess. To many others, however, that was precisely her attraction。
Diana was beautiful, in a fresh-faced, English, outdoors-girl kind of way. She used her big blue eyes to their fullest advantage, melting the hearts of men and women through an expression of complete vulnerability. Diana's eyes, like those of Marilyn Monroe, contained an appeal directed not to any individual but to the world at large（一般，大体上）. Please don't hurt me, they seemed to say. She often looked as if she were on the verge （brink, edge） of tears, in the manner of folk images of the Virgin Mary. Yet she was one of the richest, most glamorous(富有魔力的，迷人的，刺激性的) and socially powerful women in the world. This combination of vulnerability and power was perhaps her greatest asset.
Diana was a princess, but there are many princesses in Europe, none of whom ever came close to capturing the popular imagination the way she did. Princess Grace of Monaco was perhaps the nearest thing, but then she had really been a movie star, which surely provided the vital luster（glow, gleam, brightness, brilliance） to her role as figurehead(船首雕像，傀儡首领) of a country that is little more than a gambling casino on the southern coast of France. The rather louche（不正直的，邪恶的） glamour of Monaco's royal family is nothing compared with the fading but still palpable（明显的，摸得出的，易察觉的） grandeur（庄严，雄伟） of the British monarchy. To those who savor（品尝） such things, British royals are the first among equals of world royalty, the last symbols of an aristocratic（贵族的，贵族政治的，气派高雅的） society that has largely disappeared in most places but still hangs on, with much of its Victorian pomp（华丽壮观） intact（原封不动）, in Britain. Even the Japanese Emperor Hirohito never forgot being overawed（恐吓，威压） by the style of his British royal hosts on his first trip to Europe in the 1920s.
Diana not only married into the British monarchy but was the offspring of a family, the Spencers, that is at least as old as the British royal family and considers itself in some ways to be rather grander. It is not rare in England to hear the Spencers' Englishness compared favorably with the "foreign" (German) background of the Windsors. The famous speech, given by Diana's younger brother, the Earl of Spencer, at her funeral in London, with its barely contained hostility toward his royal in-laws, moved many people at the time but was in fact an exercise of extraordinary hauteur （arrogance） .
So Diana had snob (势利小人) appeal to burn. But that alone would not have secured her popularity. Most of the people who worshipped her, who read every tidbit（小道消息= titbit） about her in the gossip press and hung up pictures of her in their rooms, were not social snobs. Like Princess Grace of Monaco, Diana was a celebrity royal. She was a movie star who never actually appeared in a movie; in a sense her whole life was a movie, a serial melodrama acted out in public, with every twist and turn of the plot reported to a world audience. Diana was astute （= sharp, shrewd） enough to understand the power of television and the voracious (=wolfish)
British tabloid newspapers. And she consistently tried to use the mass media as a stage for projecting her image — as the wronged spouse, as the radiant society beauty, as the compassionate princess hugging AIDS patients and land-mine victims, and as the mourning princess crying at celebrity funerals.
However, like many celebrities before her, she found out that she couldn't turn the media on and off at will, as though they were a tap. They needed her to feed the public appetite for celebrity gossip, and she needed them for her public performance, but what she hadn't bargained for was that her melodrama ran on without breaks. Everything she said or did was fair copy. After deliberately making her private life public, she soon discovered there was nothing private left
In a sense, the quasi-religious mystique（神秘的魅力，秘诀） of royalty came full circle with Diana. Monarchy used to be based on divine right. But just as monarchy used religious trappings to justify its rule, modern show-biz(= show business) celebrity has a way of slipping into a form of popular religion. It is surely not for nothing that an idolized pop singer of recent times so successfully exploited her given name, Madonna. One of the most traditional roles of religious idols is a sacrificial one; we project our sins onto them, and they bear our crosses in public.
Diana was a sacrificial symbol in several ways. First she became the patron saint of victims, the sick, the discriminated against, the homeless. Then, partly through her real suffering at the hands of a rigidly formal family trained to play rigidly formal public roles, and partly through her shrewd manipulation of the press, Diana herself projected a compelling image of victimhood. Women in unhappy marriages identified with her; so did outsiders of one kind or another, ethnic, sexual or social. Like many religious idols, she was openly abused and ridiculed, in her case by the same press that stoked（挑起，arise） the public worship of her. And finally she became the ultimate victim of her own fame: pursued by paparazzi(偷拍名人的狗仔队), she became a twisted and battered body in a limousine （豪华车）. It was a fittingly tawdry（华丽而俗气的） end to what had become an increasingly tawdry melodrama（音乐剧）. But it is in the nature of religion that forms change to fit the times. Diana — celebrity, tabloid princess, mater dolorosa （悲伤的母亲） of the pop and fashion scene — was, if nothing else, the perfect idol for our times.
Ian Buruma is the author of The Wages of Guilt and, most recently, Anglomania

Brian78UID: 2604416

历史，科学类

History of science

Crooked path to universal truth

A CONTROVERSIAL British historian, E.H. Carr, reckoned that his subject was shaped by the very process of studying it. “The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous（荒谬的） fallacy,” he wrote, “but one which it is very hard to eradicate（根除）.” Patricia Fara provides a reminder that science is also a human activity.

The birth of science is often dated to 1660, when the Royal Society was founded in London by the followers of Francis Bacon, who argued that knowledge could come only by testing ideas through experiment. Ms Fara, however, points out that they did not start with a blank slate（石板）. She places the roots of science back in ancient Babylon, where court advisers developed mathematical and astronomical expertise. Admittedly, these observers were watching the skies in the hope of gleaning（收集） future portents（征兆）. Their observations, however, could be interpreted as scientific because they were trying to correlate what they saw. The fact that they were ultimately unsuccessful, because the movements of heavenly bodies do not determine political events on Earth, does not invalidate（使无效） the process by which this conclusion was eventually drawn.

Ms Fara also argues, persuasively, that science is rarely an esoteric（深奥的） effort to attain pure knowledge, as envisaged（正视） by Bacon. Rather it stems（滋生） from attempts to gain power through activities such as politics, magic, religion, trade and war. The Babylonian astronomers were seeking political advantage. The main motive of many Islamic scholars and, indeed, Newton himself, was the better understanding of God. The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 unleashed（释放） an era of exploration, in which scientific instruments became crucial for navigators. Warfare has long driven science, perhaps most visibly in the development of nuclear weapons（好观点，好例子）.

Because science is done by people, its progress is messy（凌乱的）. Sometimes those who shout the loudest are initially accepted as being correct. It takes time for a rival（竞争者，对手） interpretation of results to be accepted as a better explanation. Scientists themselves indulge（纵容） in political manoeuvring（操纵）, trying to win funding for their preferred lines of investigation, denigrating（毁誉） their colleagues as they do so. Ms Fara identifies the many cases where the work of various women throughout history has not been credited, and men have claimed the discoveries as their own. Similarly, Chinese inventions have been recast（重铸） as European and the role of Islamic scholars ignored.

The book romps（顽皮调戏） through history at a terrific rate: from ancient Greece through the Islamic empire of the 13th century, 15th-century China and Renaissance Europe to 20th-century America. It races through ideas: how learned societies emerged, how the theory of evolution affected the way people viewed themselves, how scientific progress brought power to its protagonists（领导者，积极参与者）. Ms Fara’s informal style helps to speed the pace, but sometimes grates. She also occasionally repeats the same arguments to illustrate different points. Yet the book is so wide-ranging and provocative（煽动的） that these faults can be forgiven.

Scientists like to present their subject as a clear progression（行进） from one idea springing from a masterful mind, through its experimental verification（确认） to the next ingenious（有独创性的） insight; each cool and rational step taken in an orderly fashion. Ms Fara argues that there is no unique path to universal truth. Rather science progresses in fits and starts, with many avenues terminating as blind alleys. Moreover, unlike art, science is a collective activity that demands collaboration（协作）. If Isaac Newton saw farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, then those giants themselves had been standing on the shoulders of others.

wildrose800331UID: 2602131

政治 人权类 超喜欢 同时为自己的残缺信息库 汗颜

Martin Luther King
He led a mass struggle for racial equality that doomed segregation and changed America forever
By JACK E. WHITE

Intro: Our Century ... and the Next One
21st Century: The Shape of the Future

Monday, April 13, 1998
It is a testament to the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. that nearly every major city in the U.S. has a street or school named after him. It is a measure of how sorely his achievements are misunderstood that most of them are located in black neighborhoods.

Three decades after King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., he is still regarded mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality. That assessment, while accurate, is far too restrictive（约束的）. For all King did to free blacks from the yoke（bridle, harness, shackle） of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from the burden of America's centuries-old hypocrisy(伪善，矫饰) about race. It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the U.S. can claim to be the leader of the "free world" without inviting smirks of disdain and disbelief. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched beside him failed, vast regions of the U.S. would have remained morally indistinguishable from South Africa under apartheid（种族隔离制度）, with terrible consequences for America's standing among nations. How could America have convincingly inveighed（猛烈抨击） against the Iron Curtain（虾米） while an equally oppressive（压迫的） Cotton Curtain remained draped（垂挂，hang） across the South?

Even after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954, what the world now calls human-rights offenses were both law and custom in much of America. Before King and his movement, a tired and thoroughly respectable Negro seamstress(女缝纫工) like Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply because she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus so a white man could sit down. A six-year-old black girl like Ruby Bridges could be hectored（威吓，欺凌） and spit on（吐口水） by a white New Orleans mob （crowd, hang, mass 乌合之众） simply because she wanted to go to the same school as white children. A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Even highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they chose. In some rural enclaves（被包领土，少数民族集团） in the South, they were even compelled to get off the sidewalk and stand in the street if a Caucasian walked by.
The movement that King led swept
all that away. Its victory was so complete that even though those outrages took place within the living memory of the baby boomers, they seem like ancient history. And though this revolution was the product of two centuries of agitation（骚动，煽动） by thousands upon thousands of courageous men and women, King was its culmination. It is impossible to think of the movement unfolding as it did without him at its helm（command, control, wheel， steer）. He was, as the cliché(陈腔滥调) has it, the right man at the right time.
To begin with, King was a preacher（传道者） who spoke in biblical（圣经的） cadences（声调，韵律） ideally suited to leading a stride toward freedom that found its inspiration in the Old Testament story of the Israelites（以色列人） and the New Testament gospel（福音） of Jesus Christ. Being a minister not only put King in touch with the spirit of the black masses but also gave him a base within the black church, then and now the strongest and most independent of black institutions.
Moreover, King was a man of extraordinary physical courage whose belief in nonviolence never swerved（shift, sidestep 偏离正轨）. From the time he assumed leadership of the Montgomery（蒙哥马利）, Ala., bus boycott in 1955 to his murder 13 years later, he faced hundreds of death threats. His home in Montgomery was bombed, with his wife and young children inside. He was hounded（hunted, chased） by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which bugged his telephone and hotel rooms, circulated salacious(好色的) gossip about him and even tried to force him into committing suicide after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. As King told the story, the defining moment of his life came during the early days of the bus boycott. A threatening telephone call at midnight alarmed him: "Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house." Shaken, King went to the kitchen to pray. "I could hear an inner voice saying to me, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.'"
In recent years, however, King's most quoted line—"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"—has been put to uses he would never have endorsed. It has become the slogan for opponents of affirmative action like California's Ward Connerly, who insist, incredibly, that had King lived he would have been marching alongside them. Connerly even chose King's birthday last year to announce the creation of his nationwide crusade against "racial preferences."
Such would-be kidnappers of King's legacy have chosen a highly selective interpretation of his message. They have filtered out his radicalism and sense of urgency. That most famous speech was studded（散布，点缀） with demands. "We have come to our nation's capital to cash a check," King admonished（rebuke, reprimand, reproach, reprove,惩戒，训谕，训诫）. "When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir（继承人，嗣子）," King said. "Instead of honoring this sacred（神圣的，受崇敬的） obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' " These were not the words of a cardboard（纸板） saint advocating a Hallmark（品质的证明，特征） card-style version of brotherhood. They were the stinging（有刺的，尖酸刻薄的） phrases of a prophet（预言者）, a man demanding justice not just in the hereafter, but in the here and now.
TIME national correspondent Jack E. White has covered civil rights issues for 30 years

qtangtangsUID: 2630008

人物的例子～

Face value

Godly but ambitious

Jun 18th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Adnan Yousif wants to build the first truly global Islamic(伊斯兰教的) bank

MOST practitioners(实习者) of Islamic finance pride themselves on(pride..on得意于，为…自豪) their modesty. But not Adnan Yousif, the chairman of the Union of Arab Banks(例子人物出现了！), a regional club for financial firms. He has recently struck a tone more reminiscent of greed-is-good Wall Street, with a grand plan to build the biggest Islamic bank yet seen, spanning the world and providing Muslim countries with new financial services their people have barely heard of. “People never thought big here, never thought globally,”(这句话可以引用) he says.

Mr Yousif’s ambitions date to the founding of modern Islamic finance. During the 1970s oil boom the Gulf’s Muslim elite needed to put their new-found wealth somewhere, and American government bonds seemed the safest option. Yet Islam prohibits the charging of interest. So some sheikhs bought bonds but let their Western banks keep the interest, in the casual manner of a customer leaving change on a restaurant table. To Mr Yousif, then a young banker at American Express in his native Bahrain, this made no sense. At a time when Muslim countries had imposed an oil embargo over America’s support for Israel why, he wondered, refuse the Americans oil but give them billions of dollars?

The embargo faltered and ever more money flowed to the Gulf, prompting Muslim scholars to seek ways to cleanse finance of interest payments. Practical men like Mr Yousif paid attention. In 1980 he moved to Arab Banking Corporation, a Bahraini bank, and set up an Islamic-finance division. It was little more than a few desks in a bare room where white-robed bankers created investments that generated profits in forms other than interest. The bank’s bosses thought it would be, at best, a niche business with little chance of competing against Western-style finance.

But over the next two decades Islamic banking prospered, driven by a revival of faith following the Iranian revolution in 1979. By the turn of the century there were more than 200 Islamic banks and Mr Yousif was leading from the front. He turned his bank’s Islamic-finance division into a stand-alone institution, then became chief executive of Bahrain Islamic Bank in 2002. Two years later, now head of the Al Baraka Group, another Bahraini bank, he oversaw its initial public offering (IPO), the largest thus far by an Islamic bank. Along the way, interest-avoidance schemes became ever more sophisticated. Today $700 billion of global assets are said to comply with sharia law. Even so, traditional finance houses rather than Islamic institutions continue to handle most Gulf oil money and other Muslim wealth.

In private, some Gulf bankers speak of the need for an “Islamic Goldman Sachs”. That is what Mr Yousif is now attempting to create—a sharia-compliant investment bank with global reach and ready access to capital. It will be called Istikhlaf, Arabic for “doing God’s work”. Others in the industry have welcomed the move. “Islamic banking cannot be taken seriously until we have some global Islamic banks,” says Simon Eedle, managing director of Islamic banking at Calyon, a French investment bank. “They don’t have to be present everywhere in the world, but they need to be in the top 100.”

Mr Yousif says he has raised $3.5 billion from Gulf investors and is seeking the same again by the end of the year. In addition he plans a $3 billion IPO in Dubai and Bahrain. The oil price is down from last year’s peak, but there is plenty of cash in the region looking for a home. So far, though, most of what Mr Yousif has collected comes from other banks rather than private investors. He and his backers, including Sheikh Saleh Kamel, the force behind the Al Baraka Group, delayed the launch of Istikhlaf last year after turbulence in the financial markets. They also dropped talk of raising up to $100 billion—at least for now.

Even with a more modest capital base of $10 billion, Istikhlaf will stand a reasonable chance of picking up lucrative finance deals. The region’s ubiquitous infrastructure projects need beefy backers. Most Islamic banks have so far been absent from this field because of their small size. Deals instead went to sharia-compliant units of multinationals like Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Citigroup. These will now face stronger local competition.

Mr Yousif’s ambitions do not end there. He plans to create a team of venture-capital researchers to sift through innovators’ ideas and provide the good ones with a cradle-to-IPO service. Many people do this successfully in Silicon Valley, but potential investors in his bank may wonder how easy it will be to transplant that sort of high-technology entrepreneurship to the Gulf.

You say sukuk, I say heresy

More worrying still, the rules for Islamic finance are not uniform around the world.(这是worry,可以写这位仁兄不怕艰辛xxxxx…) A Kuwaiti Muslim cannot buy a Malaysian sukuk (sharia-compliant bond) because of differing definitions of what constitutes usury. Indeed, a respected Islamic jurist recently denounced most sukuk as godless. Nor are banking licences granted easily in most Muslim countries. That is why big Islamic banks are so weak. Often they are little more than loose collections of subsidiaries. They also lack home-grown talent: most senior staff are poached from multinationals.

There are worries, too, about Istikhlaf’s lack of a Saudi presence or partner. There have been rumours of a merger with Saudi Investment Bank, although Mr Yousif has denied this. Such a deal would be a big help. Saudi Arabia is one of the main growth areas for Islamic banking. It has the largest oil reserves and the most valuable project-finance deals. It is no coincidence therefore that the biggest Islamic bank to date, Al Rajhi, is Saudi. But if anyone can snatch the lead from the Saudis it is Mr Yousif. Never afraid of breaking the mould, he confesses to admiring Alan Greenspan, a man (of Jewish origins) better known as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the prophet of rugged capitalism, than as a scholar of holy scripture. Mr Yousif has read the former Fed chairman’s memoirs “three or four times”, he says. With luck he will heed Mr Greenspan’s warnings about irrational exuberance.

这纯属一个例子，引用出来描述这个人从小文员做起，因为自己的XXX然后变成现在这样，红色部分标出的是经历和事迹，具体怎么用看个人了哈～