Smithsonian articles from September 2007

Smithsonian archives from September 2007

Sci-hight.(FROM THE CASTLE)
September 22, 2007... MANY OF the young men and women in this special issue can trace the passion they feel for their work to a few key experiences. The same is true for most scientists. My own love of science came from a love of nature. As a Boy Scout, I camped...

A pox upon the kauri: New Zealanders rally to save their much-loved, 2,000-year-old national symbol.(PHENOMENA)
September 22, 2007... ONE OF THE WORLD'S oldest and largest living trees stands just a few steps from a major highway in New Zealand's Waipoua Forest. The Tane Mahuta, or "Lord of the Forest," in the language of the indigenous Maori people, is estimated to be...

West side glory: out of Hell's Kitchen came an image that would epitomize one of Broadway's greatest love stories.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
September 22, 2007... FOR THEATER LOVERS who can chart their lives by the plays that left them laughing, crying or humming in the shower, the right photograph is a gift that fixes stars in the firmament of lost time. No one gave fans better gifts than Leo...

Meet the innovators.(Christina Galitsky)
September 22, 2007... BRAVE IS THE ENGINEER who invents a new stove and goes out into the world to demonstrate it, braver still the one who does so in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region. Yet that is where Christina Galitsky, 34, of the Lawrence Berkeley National...

Water works: taking up the family business, Philippe Cousteau campaigns to save our oceans and rivers.
September 22, 2007... AS OUR ALUMINUM-HULLED skiff makes its way up the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., it hardly seems possible that we are on a tributary of the Potomac, within a mile of the United States Capitol. The shore is strewn with garbage; plastic...

Roving eye: documentary filmmaker Rachel Grady opens our eyes to the complexities of overlooked places and people.
September 22, 2007... IF ONE'S NOTION of a documentary filmmaker conjures up a studiously remote observer, Rachel Grady breaks the mold. Grady is unabashedly passionate about her work--despite her claim that "the only thing motivating me is my curiosity I can be...

Midas touch: to clean highly polluted groundwater, Michael Wong has developed a detergent based on gold.
September 22, 2007... "I ADMIT IT DOES SOUND CRAZY," says Michael Wong of his idea to use gold to clean up toxic waste. Wong plans to combine gold with palladium--an even more precious metal--to treat polluted groundwater beneath waste dumps and contaminated...

Hot idea: Christina Galitsky's energy-efficient cookstove makes life a little easier for Darfur's refugees.
September 22, 2007... NEARLY THREE YEARS AGO, Christina Galitsky joined a team of scientists who had been asked an urgent question. Was it possible for researchers at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where she is an engineer, to devise an...

High scorer; Composer Nico Muhly has already wowed them at Carnegie Hall and the New York Public Library. Next up: the American Ballet Theatre.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... OH, TO BE NICO MUHLY--26 years old, exuberantly talented, a friend and colleague of musicians ranging from Bjork to Philip Glass and still basking in the afterglow of the first-ever, full-evening concert of his music, presented by no less...

Painting the edge: with an eye Lisa Sanditz captures the sublime.
September 22, 2007... LISA SANDITZ'S landscape paintings vibrate with compressed data--signature styles of other artists, strange places that she's visited or heard or read about, brushwork techniques that range from the broad and splashy to the repetitively...

Stepping up: even as he travels the world, dancer and hip-hopper Marc Bamuthi Joseph has stayed close to his musical roots.
September 22, 2007... SAN FRANCISCO'S Intersection for the Arts was throbbing with the beats of deep soul and house music. In a corner, a boy was break dancing, gleefully spinning on his back, oblivious to passersby slowly gravitating toward the DJ booth in the...

Shell fame: Paleobiologist Aaron O'Dea has made his name by sweating the small stuff.
September 22, 2007... FOR 100 MILLION YEARS, North America and South America were islands unto themselves, separated by a sea that linked today's Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Then, over the course of a mere million years--about a week and a half in people...

Flower power: studying ancient botanical drawings, Daniela Bleichmar is rewriting the history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
September 22, 2007... A LOT OF COLLEGE PROFESSORS talk about the breadth of their interests; crossing academic boundaries is in vogue. But Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, has been thinking this way for as long as...

Mounds vs. Vegans: in drawings and paintings, Trenton Doyle Hancock pits archetypes against each other.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... ONE OF THE YOUNGEST artists ever included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition (in both 2000 and 2002), Trenton Doyle Hancock, 33, incorporates comic-book and surreal themes into his satirical, intricately detailed...

How to make a dodo: biologist Beth Shapiro has figured out a recipe for success in the field of ancient DNA research.
September 22, 2007... IF YOU'RE TRYING to isolate dodo DNA, follow these steps: first, find a dodo bone that hasn't fossilized. This should be easy. Among the few known in the world are a skull and a left foot that are stored in boxes on the second floor of the...

Site seer: faced with the Internet's overwhelming clutter, Joshua Schachter invented a deceptively simple tool that helps us all cut to the chase.
September 22, 2007... JOSHUA SCHACHTER didn't plan to organize the Internet. Back in 1998, all he wanted to do was keep track of those sites on the World Wide Web--then barely a decade old--that he might want to visit again. On his blog, Memepool, he asked readers...

Russian idol: Moscow-born Regina Spektor draws on classical music roots to create and perform pop songs of rare originality.
September 22, 2007... ROCK CONCERTS aren't generally known for their thought-provoking tranquillity. But something remarkable happened at this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a weekend concert to which some 50,000 fans flock annually despite...

Flu fighter: with a possible pandemic in our future, immunologist John Wherry is racing to develop a once-a-lifetime vaccine.
September 22, 2007... AS A CHILD, John Wherry enjoyed taking apart machines, including his father's treasured toy train. Now, as an immunologist, he's dismantling perhaps the most intricate machine of all--the human immune system--to develop a vaccine that...

Show stopper: in her toughest performance, the classically trained dance star Alicia Graf showed true grit overcoming a career-threatening ailment.
September 22, 2007... ALICIA J. GRAF was waiting at the Alvin Ailey dance studio in Manhattan for the bus to the airport. She was dressed in jeans and a soft gray sweater, her voluminous curls, usually worn loose, pulled back in a knot. She was clutching dozens of...

Dogged: primatologist Brian Hare investigates the social behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos in Africa. But dogs and foxes showed him the way.
September 22, 2007... WHEN BRIAN HARE started college in 1994, he apprenticed himself to a top chimpanzee researcher. His mentor, Michael Tomasello, was just beginning to investigate whether chimpanzees can understand what another chimp--or perhaps even a...

Chameleon: playwright and performer Sarah Jones displays a genius for climbing into other people's skin.
September 22, 2007... SARAH JONES SPEAKS BETTER THAN passable French. Although she's used it in one of her shows, she has yet to impersonate a Left Bank fashionista. But it endears her to the waiter at a Belgian cafe in Greenwich Village. Just moments before, she...

The big picture: political historian Jeremi Suri has come up with a new way of looking at the links between the low and the mighty.
September 22, 2007... JEREMI SURI looks locally and sees globally. And that lets him make novel connections between, say, the protest movements of the 1960s and superpower detente in the 1970s. Traditional analyses of reduced tensions between the United States...

Mighty mouth: spoken-word artist Mayda del Valle brings to life "democracy writ large in poetry".
September 22, 2007... AT 5-FOOT-I AND IIO POUNDS, Mayda del Valle may be petite, but she has the stage presence of a gargantua. At a recent music, dance and spoken-word event called "Race, Rap and Redemption," the 28-year-old poet commands the University of...

The player: Luis von Ahn's secret for making computers smarter? Get thousands of people to take part in his cunning online games.
September 22, 2007... LUIS VON AHN has a lofty vision and a short attention span. The 29-year-old computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University prefers short stories to novels, TV shows to short stories, and the Internet to all of the above. If others share his...

Signs of life: astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger analyzes light from distant stars for evidence we are not alone.
September 22, 2007... ASTRONOMERS ESTIMATE that there may be dozens of Earth-size planets in our neighborhood--say, within about 75 light-years away--and some of them just might be teeming with life. As they shine dimly into space, they send photons--light...

Down to earth: anthropologist Amber VanDerwarker is unraveling the mysteries of the ancient Olmec by figuring out what they ate.
September 22, 2007... STARTING AROUND 1200 B.C., in southern Mexico, the Olmec created what most scholars agree was the first New World civilization, building large cities with monumental architecture, carving reliefs of animal gods, and trading raw materials and...

One man band: the next Bob Dylan? Maybe. Sufjan Stevens' honest sound and stark lyrics speak volumes to a new generation. And he plays all the instruments.(Biography)
September 22, 2007... ON HIS DEBUT ALBUM, A Sun Came, which appeared in 2000, Sufjan Stevens sang, played all the instruments--piano, electric guitar, oboe, banjo, sitar and xylophone--wrote the melodies and lyrics and even recorded it himself, on a four-track...

Wild woman: playwright Sarah Ruhl speaks softly an carries a big kick.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... CAN PROSE CAPTURE Sarah Ruhl? A poet by nature and a playwright by trade, she materializes among the lunch crowd as if out of nowhere, bent lovingly over a stroller, her face shaded by a floppy knit cap. The place: Cafe Fiorello, a popular...

Primed for success: Terence Tao is regarded as first among equals among young mathematicians, but who's counting.
September 22, 2007... THERE'S A SCENE in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind in which Russell Crowe as mathematician John Nash asks his beautiful wife-to-be to gaze into the evening sky and name any shape--an umbrella, for instance--and then says he will find...

Faith healer: religious historian Reza Aslan calls for a return to Islam's tradition of tolerance.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... IRANIAN-AMERICAN religious scholar Reza Aslan, 35, is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005). WHAT DID YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH WITH NO GOD BUT GOD? The book was an attempt to break through the...

Organizing principal: in the South Bronx, Ramon Gonzalez gives a troubled middle school a kidcentric makeover.
September 22, 2007... 7:50 A.M.: "Good morning, Jose, how's everything? What's going on, Jacob? How's your mom? I haven't seen her in a while." At Middle School 223, the day begins with principal Ramon Gonzalez in the hallway, greeting his students. He shakes...

The bias detective: how does prejudice affect people? Psychologist Jennifer Richeson is on the case.
September 22, 2007... JENNIFER RICHESON has a sweet tooth. She likes jelly beans--especially green jelly beans. "I could eat them ad nauseam--and I do," she tells her students in the "Stereotyping and Prejudice" course she teaches at Northwestern University If...

Crossing the divide: novelist Daniel Alarcon's writings evoke the gritty, compelling landscape of urban Latin America.(Biography)
September 22, 2007... HE IS SLIGHT, somewhat shy, a little tousled, with the look of a boy who has just come running off the soccer field. There is no grandiosity, no bespectacled elegance, none of the glamour or strut we tend to associate with Latin American...

Civil wrongs: in a painstaking study of 1960s Atlanta, Kevin Kruse takes suburban whites to task.
September 22, 2007... AT COLLEGE 15 YEARS AGO, Kevin Kruse delved into the civil rights movement and came away with the feeling that something was missing. "Most civil rights histories seemed to focus on only two kinds of whites--the crusading liberals and the...

Rocks of ages: where did the world's highest mountains come from? Geologist Elizabeth Catlos takes a new view.
September 22, 2007... WHEN ELIZABETH CATLOS decided to become a geologist, she could barely tell one type of granite from another. Fortunately, she's a quick study She had majored in chemistry at the University of California at San Diego, and when she enrolled in...

I, lender: software engineer Matt Flannery pioneers internet microloans to the world's poor.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... MATT FLANNERY, 30, co-founded the nonprofit Kiva.org, a microlending site, in 2004. Kiva operates on a people-to-people model, allowing private individuals to make loans to borrowers seeking to establish small businesses in developing...

Comedienne of manners: novelist ZZ Packer uses humor to point up some disconcerting signposts along America's racial divide.
September 22, 2007... WHEN ZZ PACKER WAS 27, the New Yorker published her short story about a troubled black girl at Yale in its 2000 debut fiction issue. That same year, her tale about racial strife on a Brownie troop camping trip was chosen for The Best American...

Keeper of the keys: pianist Jason Moran laces his strikingly original music with the soulful sounds of jazz greats.
September 22, 2007... THE GREAT figures of jazz history did not typically have investment banker fathers or childhoods that included serious amounts of tennis and golf. Jason Moran did. Still, the acclaimed Houston-born jazz pianist feels a visceral connection...

Marked man: guerrilla artist James De La Vega leverages his street smarts to fashion a career.
September 22, 2007... AT MANHATTAN street muralist James De La Vega's storefront gallery in the East Village, the hipsters clutch at T-shirts bearing his doodles and drawings--a scene slightly at odds with De La Vega's image as the renegade graffitist the New York...

Net worker: where are your friends in cyberspace? Closer than you might think, says Internet researcher Jon Kleinberg.
September 22, 2007... JON KLEINBERG helps us see the invisible networks that pervade our lives. A professor of computer science at Cornell, he teaches a class with the economist David Easley that covers, Kleinberg says, "how opinions, fads and political movements...

Making the grade: Yurok Indian Geneva Wiki is helping other young Native Americans "develop their best selves".
September 22, 2007... GENEVA WIKI is fighting the flu. "You're seeing me at only about 75 percent of my normal energy," says the director of the Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, in Klamath, California. It's a formidable 75 percent. Two of her teachers...

Island idylls: a queen on her throne and chips falling where they may.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Editorial)
September 1, 2007... ONE OF MANY remarkable things about albatrosses, Kennedy Warne reports, "is that the members of a pair, despite not seeing each other for months after their chick has fledged, often return to their nest site within days of each other at the...

Correction.(Correction notice)
September 1, 2007... "Mad, Stark Mad" incorrectly stated that San Francisco resident Philo T. Farnsworth was the first to transmit a televised image, in 1927. That feat was achieved by Scotsman John Logie Baird in 1924.

"It felt like a real discovery": six decades after the death of an unheralded New York City municipal photographer, a researcher stumbles upon his forgotten negatives.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Eugene de Salignac)
September 1, 2007... IN 1999, MICHAEL LORENZINI, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city's vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a...

New old wolf.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(ice age)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... An extinction 12,000 years ago claimed woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons. And a wolf, according to a new Smithsonian-led study of ancient bones from Alaska. Scientists previously thought ice age wolves were variants of modern...

The hive mind.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(honeybee queen)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... A honeybee queen produces a pheromone that attracts young workers and stimulates them to feed and groom her. Now New Zealand scientists say the same pheromone prevents these caretaker bees from learning to extend their stingers when...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(observations on Tachornis squamata)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... NAME: Tachornis squamata, or the fork-tailed palm-swift. WAS KNOWN TO: Build nests out of plant matter, saliva and other birds' feathers. NOW KNOWN TO: Procure those feathers by ripping them off other birds' backs, in flight. WE...

A frigid dead zone? Hardly.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(icebergs)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... New research shows that icebergs are hot spots of marine life. Enriched with dirt that was collected when the ice was still part of a glacier, a melting berg slowly releases trace metals that help phytoplankton grow, feeding krill, fish and...

Transplanting Agriculture.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... People domesticated certain plants--that is, cultivated them rather than just collecting wild fruits or seeds--well over 10,000 years ago. But when did people first introduce crops to new areas? The oldest known New World evidence comes from...

Beyond the fringes: the author traces some abiding infatuations--and old antagonisms--to his seaside boyhood home.(MY KIND OF TOWN)(Excerpt)
September 1, 2007... MY HEART BELONGS TO NEWPORT, the historic little gem of a city on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, but to say so is a little misleading because my Newport also includes Middletown, which borders it to the east and north. I have known both...

Interview Richard Lerner, psychologist, Medford, Massachusetts: the tufts university developmental scientist challenges the myth of the troubled adolescent in his new book, The Good Teen.(Interview)
September 1, 2007... HOW DID TEENAGERS GET SUCH A BAD RAP? You can go back to the time of the Greeks and find teenagers causing problems. The scientific study of adolescence began in 1904, with G. Stanley Hall, one of the leading psychologists in the United...

Jefferson's dig.(THIS MONTH'S GUIDE TO NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(Big Bone Lick State Park)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... UNION, KENTUCKY -- To Thomas Jefferson's impressive resume, add paleontologist. In September 1807, a year after the triumphant return of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, Jefferson again commissioned William Clark, this time to organize...

A school's hardest test.(THIS MONTH'S GUIDE TO NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(1957 desegregation crisis in Central High, Arkansas)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... LITTLE ROCK -- Minnijean Brown Trickey was one of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American teenagers who 50 years ago this month braved angry mobs at Central High to desegregate the school under the protection of an Army escort. Crowded...

Rescue dogs.(THIS MONTH'S GUIDE TO NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(Congressional Cemetery)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Founded 200 years ago a mile and a half from the Capitol, Congressional Cemetery is the final resting place for war heroes, Native American chiefs, members of Congress and such notables as Mathew Brady, John Philip Sousa...

Life on the levee.(THIS MONTH'S GUIDE TO NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... LOCKE, CALIFORNIA -- Bikers roar into this four-block town for the grilled steaks served with peanut butter at Al's Place, but many visitors come for a taste of history. Clinging to a levee on the Sacramento River 75 miles from San Francisco,...

September anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)(Era overview)
September 1, 2007... 150 YEARS AGO DASHING DITTY Massachusetts-born church organist James Pierpont copyrights "One Horse Open Sleigh" in September 1857. With no mention of Christmas in the lyrics, the song, retitled "Jingle Bells" in 1859, still becomes a...

Daringly different.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
September 1, 2007... Over his 36-year career, Dennis Stanford hasn't just studied ancient peoples--he has tried to live like them. The head of archaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, he has spent time with Inuit hunters. He learned to drive a dog...

Jukebox.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... CAJUN VOICE Hardly anyone listened to Cajun music before the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, when Dewey Balfa mesmerized a crowd of 17,000. He went on to form the Balfa Brothers Band and helped Cajun music win world acclaim. "I will not accept it...

Object lessons.(FROM THE CASTLE)(Smithsonian educational programs for students and teachers)
September 1, 2007... OUR 20-MONTH-OLD DAUGHTER, CAROLINA, attends the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center (SEEC), an early childhood education program with museum-related, themed activities such as comparison visits to a bird exhibit at the National Museum of...

Kitchen aid: a 1930s utensil evokes our love affair with chocolate.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)(molinillo)
September 1, 2007... AT FIRST GLANCE, the curious implement--a carved, hand--painted wooden stick, 11.5 inches long, with a slender handle at one end and a knob at the other--appears unprepossessing enough. Yet the kitchen tool, currently on display as part of...

Native portraits.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Gertrude Kasebier's portrait photographs of Sioux)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... In 1898, Gertrude Kasebier, one of America's leading portrait photographers, asked Buffalo Bill Cody if she could take pictures of Native Americans in his Wild West show. Nine of the Sioux performers agreed to a portrait session. In her...

Q & A.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Bruce Willis)(Interview)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... With the release of Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth Die Hard movie, BRUCE WILLIS, who starred as cop John McClane, gave a signature sweat-drenched undershirt and other items to the Museum of American History. He spoke with the magazine's...

Virus claims backyard birds.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(West Nile virus)(North American Breeding Bird Survey)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... West Nile virus is threatening robins, chickadees, crows and other birds, says a new Smithsonian study, which analyzed 26 years of data collected by the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey. Run by the United States and Canadian...

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
September 1, 2007... DIFFERENT LIGHT Munich-based Ingo Maurer assembled metal chopsticks, porcelain shards and Buddha dolls to create this three-foot-tall chandelier, which he calls "an appeal not to stagnate in one's habits. Fifty-three of his tricked-out...

The amazing albatrosses: they fly 50 miles per hour. Go years without touching land. Predict the weather. Mate for life. And they're among the world's most endangered birds. Can albatrosses be saved?
September 1, 2007... THROUGH THE FOG steamed our yacht, Mahalia, sliding down gray ocean swells. The gale that had kept us in port for three days in the Chatham Islands, east of New Zealand, had blown itself out, and banks of sea mist lolled in its wake. A fogbow...

In living color: an obscure photographic process unveiled 100 years ago opens a fresh window on the past.
September 1, 2007... THE MOST IMPROBABLE object imaginable--the lowly, lumpy potato--played a leading role in the Great Leap Forward of color photography. The story begins in 1903, when two imaginative French inventors, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, seized the pomme...

Undaunted; First Rory Stewart walked the breadth of Afghanistan. Then he took up a real challenge: restoring traditional architecture in Kabul.
September 1, 2007... IN THE MUD AND DUST of late-winter Kabul, Rory Stewart leads me through a seedy bazaar along the north bank of the Kabul River. I follow as the British adventurer turned historic preservationist ducks beneath an archway that connects two...

When Portugal ruled the seas: the country's global adventurism in the 16th century linked continents and cultures as never before, as a new exhibition makes clear.(Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries)
September 1, 2007... Globalization began, you might say, a bit before the turn of the 16th century, in Portugal. At least that's the conclusion one is likely to reach after visiting a vast exhibition, more than four years in the making, at the Smithsonian's...

Washington & Lafayette; Almost inseparable in wartime, the two generals split over a vital question: should revolutionary ideals be imposed on other nations?(George Washington)
September 1, 2007... THANKS TO A RICH historical record, we do not have to imagine the reaction of Gen. George Washington when, on July 31, 1777, he was introduced to the latest French "major general" foisted on him by the Continental Congress, this one an...

Going with the grain: on Minnesota lakes, Native Americans satisfy a growing hunger for "slow food" by harvesting authentically wild rice the old-fashioned way.
September 1, 2007... COME SEPTEMBER in northern Minnesota, on lakes on the Ojibwa lands, harvesters, two per canoe, pole through thick clusters of wild rice plants growing along the marshy shores. One stands in the stern like a gondolier; the other sits midships...

Singapore swing: peaceful and prosperous, Southeast Asia's famously uptight nation has let its hair down.(Travel narrative)
September 1, 2007... IT WAS 3 A.M. and I was fresh off a Singapore Airlines flight from Newark--at 18 hours, the longest regularly scheduled, nonstop commercial flight in the world. Jet lag was playing havoc with my system. So I left the hotel and headed over to...

Remembering Jack Kerouac: a friend of the author of On the Road, published 50 years ago this month, tells why the novel still matters.(TRIBUTE)
September 1, 2007... ONE SNOWY January night in 1957, I found myself in a Howard Johnson's in Greenwich Village buying a hot dog and baked beans for a virtually unknown writer named Jack Kerouac. It was a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg, who always looked...

Livin' large: everything's bigger in America. You could look it up.(THE LAST PAGE)
September 1, 2007... THE TOTAL U.S. FOOD SUPPLY provides 500 more calories per day per person than it did in the 1970s, an increase of 24 percent, according to the Department of Agriculture. In the 1960s, the average chicken at slaughter weighed about three...