When I was growing up in the 80s, it often seemed that the world was holding its breath, keeping its fingers crossed to prevent some sort of nuclear disaster. The apocalypse that I imagined then had to do with the world going up in a mushroom cloud, because of polarization along national and political lines. But this next generation’s experiences (as E Wesp pointed out in his comment) have been punctuated by violence of a different type, enact...

1. Race Shame As soon as I saw the shooter's name—Cho Seung-Hui—in the NYT this morning, I knew he was Korean. Crap. Ever since I got home last night after teaching, and my husband told me about the deadly shooting spree at Virginia Tech, I'd been wondering, like everyone else, about the gunman. Knowing he was a “young Asian man” made me maybe slightly more curious than I normally might have been, and finding out his name made my ...

(Or: Which charge takes precedence?) [formerly: Inspirer of Genocide. And Plagiarist? And Sloppy Reader?] A fine red dust floats in the air in Rwanda, the result of the slow attrition of volcanic rock. It permeates your clothes and shows up on your bath-towel. It’s a strangely inorganic trace to find associated with a country whose most potent image in the mind is still, twelve years after the event, the schoolyards and churches carpeted with...

Oscar and Kyala have moved on. Toga, their three-month old Jackass penguin, stolen from their home at the Amazon World zoo on December 18th, is presumed dead. Kyala has laid a new egg, and they hope to put this whole horrible ordeal behind them. It's time for healing. When Toga had been gone about 10 days, Oscar and Kyala started to build a new nest. In one of the many news stories covering this development, Kate Bright, the zoo manager--and ...

The recent creation of mice with human brain cells has got a few people excited about the possible legitimation of Don Bluth––director of The Secret of NIMH––'s cult following, and lots of other people very, very worried. Now, this study is not simply a foray into genetic mixing for its own sake, nor an attempt to form a pack of lovable, super-intelligent philosophermice. Rather the addition of human brain cells to the...

I was some way through composing my thoughts for this piece before realizing that I had said something like this before. It was back in February, and I was trying to figure out what in God’s name the Bush administration was trying to accomplish in its practice of the global war on terror. As you can read, if so moved, I was wondering after the “equation” that has so famously changed since 9/11. It was budget season, apparently, and I was c...

I have to admit I’ve been watching (well, reading) the spectacle of the Pope’s death and the election of the new one with a curiosity that has surprised me. As spectacles go, this has been one of medieval proportion and character. It seems like a thing from another time. In the days after John Paul II died, traffic in the streets around the Vatican ground to a halt as pilgrims gathered by the thousands to mourn and later to watch for the wh...

But of course her passion is the one thing we cannot know about Terri Schiavo, who has not spoken in the fifteen years since her heart failed briefly: does she want to live, or die? Her husband says she told him she would have wanted to die; her parents think she communicates with them and wants to live. As for the rest of the folks involved, including the people who attempted yesterday to perform citizens' arrests on those responsible for r...