Intellectual competition and sexual attraction, sibling rivalry, Oedipal triangles that feature daughters instead of sons -- why not?
It is about the intellectual competition between a father and son, both of them Talmudic scholars, and how that rivalry comes to threaten their relationship.
Because information is non-scarce and non-rivalry, intellectual property rights have been established to give information products a price.
Ms. Breillat's film, starring the incomparable Asia Argento, is a sharp, affecting psycho-sexual costume drama, while Ms. Bruni-Tedeschi's is a lively psychological comedy set in a hothouse, backstage world of artistic rivalry and intellectual ambition.
With rolling eyes and dancing eyebrows, Ms. Kane put across numbers like "Litvak and Galitz," which mocks a geographic rivalry between more intellectual and more emotional Jews.
A prominent Egyptian intellectual, Mohammed Sid Ahmed, also sees a natural rivalry emerging between Egypt and Israel.
The task may not only be an exacting and worthwhile one, but also one to inflame intellectual passions and fuel an academic rivalry.
Even the Anglo-Dutch wars provoked by commercial rivalry failed to interrupt this intellectual exchange, though there were some disagreeable quarrels over priority of discovery, such as Christiaan Huygens's argument with the English scientist Robert Hooke over precision time-keepers.
Mr. Jacobson also suggested that Ping-Pong can be an ideal medium for propagating literary rivalries, a fundamental part of intellectual life.
The infamous rivalry between the two leading intellectuals, on opposite sides of the political spectrum, got nasty during a debate in 1968.
