When I grew up, and I think about City Council, I look at the men and women then - these were people who just wanted to be a part of the community and give something back. They weren't necessarily trying to use it as a steppingstone to something else...
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
I prize the conditions under which I have lived because they have permitted me to choose my opportunities, to inquire into such matters as interested me, and to publish what I believed to be true, uncontrolled by any central authority.
We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.
Many parts of the granite statues were found, the most important of which had features close to Ramses II. The statue needs some restoration and weighs between four and five tons.
Instead of following through on their promise to concentrate on jobs, Republicans have attacked seniors, working families, women, and the most vulnerable among us. They have pursued an extreme agenda that would end Medicare as we know it and cut Soci...
Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over pr...
Joy begins with our convictions about spiritual truths we're willing to bet our lives on, and truths that are lodged so deeply within us that they produce a settled assurance about God.
Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stag...
What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?
Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.
Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.
Only about seventy years ago was chemistry, like a grain of seed from a ripe fruit, separated from the other physical sciences. With , and Priestley, its new era began. Medicine, pharmacy, and the useful arts, had prepared the soil upon which this se...
Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.
Going around in life using German, which Margaret had learned only a few years before, was like walking around in high heels--although it drove up the aesthetic rush of going out on the town, it was dreadfully uncomfortable after a while, and there w...
What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six millio...
At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we ...
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
Song for the Puberty Rite of a Girl Named Cowaka: A poor man takes the songs in his hand And drops them near the place where the sun sets. See, Cowaka, run to them and take them in your hand, And place them under the sunset.
The drive behind life has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the Destroyer.
If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it's usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housi...
