ONE GLOVE.(The Talk of the Town)(lost gloves)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The ratio of right-handed people to left-handed people is said to be about nine to one (and this dominance goes back more than a million years, apparently), so the lost-glove theory espoused by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who taught at Hunter College last fall, either needs work or suggests that New York is more of a lefty town than most. Last winter, Horowitz began collecting the misplaced--trampled, forlorn, snot-slicked--mittens and gloves that she saw on the street, not for the sake of research or even, God forbid, art, but out of some deep-seated altruistic urge to see them reunited with their other halves.

"It's an overweening concern for lost objects," she said last week--a very cold week,...

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