May 2008

Puzzles of Domestication
May 31, 2008

As Sandra Olsen explained in her May cover story, it's remarkably difficult to tell when and where the horse was first domesticated. "[N]o other animal has provoked such contention over the 'where' and 'when' of its domestication," Olsen wrote—"[a]part from, possibly, the dog and the pig." Intrigued, I looked up the domestication of the dog and the pig. Sure enough, just when you've accepted as a virtual certainty that domestic dogs are the descendants of East Asian wolves, along comes a fellow who plausibly casts doubt on that theory . . . .   more

Kitty See, Kitty Do

Do Cats Have Mirror Neurons?

May 24, 2008

My husband and I once rescued a stray kitten while visiting Romania, his birthplace, and urged the kitten on a friend there who had never owned a cat. This was still in Communist times, and pet ownership was rare because most people had trouble feeding themselves, much less any four-leggeds. What most Romanians knew of cats came from seeing them trot by intently in some storeroom or farmyard, going about their feline business with barely a glance for humans, unless there was food to be had.  more

Big Nothing
May 18, 2008

How do you report on the disappearance of an absence? Especially when it may have never not been there in the first place?  more

The Serpentine Envoy
May 15, 2008

Watching the movie There Will Be Blood (for which Daniel Day-Lewis won the overacting Oscar), I noticed the setting more than I usually do. In tune with the film’s flaunting of grimness, it was not picturesque. I saw a rugged, dry, stony landscape of sparse vegetation, and heard characters complaining that no crops would grow there. I thought, I bet that’s serpentine!  more

Update: Fact-Checker Insomnia
May 9, 2008

I’m a fact checker. That unconfirmed paper clip in the first transistor is bothering me. So I’ll show you what fact checkers do. (Never mind what we did before there was Google—it’s too harrowing even to think about. I vaguely remember being in a library, toting heavy volumes of magazines to a Xerox machine. At least there were Xerox machines. I’ve repressed the rest.)  more

(Annie Gottlieb)