IN the pantheon of virtues that made the U.S. great, none stands higher than the work ethic. As Richard Nixon defined it in a nationwide radio address: "The work ethic holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman at work not only makes a contribution to his fellow man but becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working." Lately the President has so often mentioned the work ethic—and so often suggested that it ...

Alone in a semidarkened room, a young woman relaxed in an armchair before a blank screen, three electrodes fixed to her scalp and one grounded to an earlobe. Suddenly a pale blue light flickered on the screen and then steadied; a voice said quietly: "That's alpha." The voice was that of Neurophysiologist Barbara Brown of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda, Calif. She was demonstrating "biofeedback training," a new way of teaching human beings to control the kind of waves ...

On a cold rainy day last week, curious Parisians packed a dingy courtroom in the Palais de Justice to hear a red-robed judge pronounce sentence on Mathilde Carre. She was a pert, petite woman with bangs —the very picture of a Parisian gamine. The French thought they understood Mathilde, though they could not forgive her.Daughter of a substantial family of professional soldiers, Mathilde Carre was on the loose in Paris just after the German conquest. She was young, attractive, divorced, and she found it all too ...

I've never been a big fan of Stieg Larsson's work. I know, I know: that's not a popular opinion. And I do acknowledge that haunted hacker Lisbeth Salander is a compelling character. But a 24-year-old woman with the body of a tween whose idea of a good time is donating anonymous sex to older men? There's a little too much of the fantasy gamine about her. That's not what I want my daughters to grow up thinking a powerful woman ...

An Indonesian woman gave birth to a 19-lb. 2-oz. baby behemoth on Sept. 24, but that was only the second weirdest pregnancy tale of the month. The strangest belongs to Julia Grovenburg, a 31-year-old Arkansas woman who has a double pregnancy. No, not twins — Grovenburg became pregnant twice, two weeks apart. Isn't that supposed to be impossible? Almost. There have been only 10 recorded cases of the phenomenon, dubbed superfetation. In Grovenburg's case, she became pregnant first ...

The process of wooing the woman voter is a little different, in one respect, from that of winning the support of the recalcitrant and suspicious male—words are sometimes not enough. Having made Georgia Neese Clark Treasurer of the U.S. and having sent diamond-studded Mrs. Perle Mesta off as minister to Luxembourg, the Democrats last week offered U.S. females further evidence of trust and affection. Mrs. Eugenie Anderson of Red Wing, Minn, was named Ambassador to Denmark.Mrs. Anderson, who was virtually unknown outside her native state, was billed ...

To get in shape for her October wedding, Dawn-Samantha Cahill, 25, a production coordinator in New York City, tried every exercise routine she could think of. But the upended positions that yoga required made her feel self-conscious. Running on a treadmill was a bore. And lifting weights was just too difficult. Frustrated, Cahill started overeating instead of exercising, and her weight, on a petite, 5-ft. 2-in. frame, ballooned to 212 lb. Cahill was nearly ready to give up, ...

Osama bin Laden once crowed to an interviewer, "Believe me, when your children and your wife become part of your struggle, life becomes very enjoyable." The late Al-Qaeda chief uttered those words before 9/11, when he was able to keep his four wives and many children living comfortably in separate houses across Afghanistan. Every few weeks or so, Bin Laden would drop in on a wife to fulfill his husbandly duties. But at the end, his rosy portrayal ...

THE last thing that Valada Penny wanted was a baby. At 22, the beautiful black woman already had one child by a teen-age marriage. While separated from her husband and living with her parents in Brooklyn, working and trying to plan her future, she again became pregnant. She considered having the child. Then, when she was more than four months along, she decided instead to have an abortion. The late procedure, which involved induced labor, was painful. "I was like ...

For almost six years, nearly every man, woman & child who wanted a job had a job. Last week for the first time since the early days of the war, the U.S. had its first real unemployment problems; some 3,000,000 people were out of work. So far it was not an alarming figure. Unemployment was still more a small reminder of grim times of the past than an indication of hard times just around the corner.But where unemployment clotted, the experience was painful. One ...