And Beethoven's Fifth became an exercise in intellectual obsession, the familiarity of the music undercut by surprising emphases and a pulse-quickening array of tempos.
Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz.
Of course, posters, thank-you cards, t-shirts, a math puzzle that you have written, or anything else that lets your numerical nerd surround himself with her own intellectual obsession will be long-appreciated.
Inasmuch as Mr. Bush can be said to have intellectual obsessions, this had always been one, but there was another reason to hammer home this argument.
Bartok has inherited some peculiar intellectual obsessions from her mother, a woman about whom it was possible to ask (somewhat romantically), "Would our mother really have been happier medicated in some kind of home or hospital ward?... Would she have studied ancient geology?
Whitemore presents a historically accurate picture of Turing: Awkward, stuttering, unashamed of his sexuality and endlessly immersed in his intellectual obsessions.
Wark was (and still is) a dynamic figure, too, but Acker, a likely candidate to follow Joan Didion and Susan Sontag as internet feminism's next pseudo-intellectual obsession, is far and away the book's headliner.
"Lemann voices the same old complaints about California -- the lack of intellectual rigor, the obsession with health, the overbearing beauty and vapidity," yet "manages to make it all sound new, accurate and hilarious," Karen Karbo wrote here in 2002.
I am a native Southern Californian (I hail from about 60 miles north of San Diego) and am thus qualified to affirm that one of the triumphs of the book is that while Lemann voices the same old complaints about California -- the lack of intellectual rigor, the obsession with health, the overbearing beauty and vapidity -- she manages to make it all sound new, accurate and hilarious.
The AOL $1.1 billion deal with Microsoft, involving the sale or licensing of more than 1,100 patents, highlights the technology world's obsession with intellectual property.
It's got the makings — war, glamour, obsession, the intellectual underpinnings of the digital age — of a great Errol Morris documentary.
