Here we were, spending all this taxpayer money teaching chimps a few hundred signs. They had no clue as to how this would illuminate our understanding of human linguistic development. Or the evolution...
He was glad to see the agent back in form, at least superficially, his finely chiseled face so pale that it might have been crafted from marble, his eyes especially bright in the cool wash of natural...
He had reached an age where he found the best way to deal with unpleasantness was to pretend it didn’t exist.
He had done the right thing and that was what counted. That was the best you could do in life. How others took it was beyond his control.
He also said you never really knew what kind of side effects might pop up until at least ten thousand people had taken a drug,
Forgive my skepticism. All the journalists I’ve dealt with have been so poorly informed. They don’t make the slightest effort to understand the science. Journalists are lazy and stupid. I won’t mentio...
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quotation: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function?
Even with the intense excitement and high spirits, the hike back to camp was grueling, as the steep hillsides were impossible to descend except in a semi-controlled sort of falling slide.
El moribundo frente marítimo al final había sucumbido al perverso huracán Yankee Clipper de 1938.
Do what? Kill me? Then my blood would be on your hands—more than it already is—as well as that of your four dear friends. Because you, frater, are responsible for all this. You know it. You made me wh...
Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind...
But now I feel rather like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch, because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Natural History Museum.
But all was not well; a creeping rot—environmental, economic, and social—had been undermining its society for some time and would eventually lead to destruction.
Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator Stumpy. Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to S...
All power structures, by their very nature, eventually get taken over by psychopaths. Almost all governments in the world have been taken over by gifted psychopaths who have a great command of human p...
Spaces again. I guess one citation wasn’t enough. Pendergast pulled out the previous ticket. You mean this? That’s right. Pendergast neatly tore it in half and tucked the pieces back into his pocket....
She spent many hours whirling around trying to catch the monarch butterflies that floated among the milkweed and chokecherries. When she caught them, she cupped them in her hands and smelled them, as...
One day she started making this gesture. It wasn’t an ASL sign at all, and I realized with a shock—I’m sorry, but you won’t believe this—that she was crossing herself. I can hardly believe it now when...
Antimacassars
Zero-sum games deal with resources that neither increase nor decrease in amount—they only shift from one player to the other. Given your present frame of mind, were you to speak now, I’m afraid you mi...