Word: alertness
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Whatever else the internet has done for or to the English language, it has popularized a very useful phrase that I will now invoke: spoiler alert. If you want to get the full effect of Kazuo Ishiguro's chilling, intensely moving novel Never Let Me Go (Knopf; 288 pages), read no further than the end of this paragraph. Never Let Me Go is the story of three people--Kathy, Tommy and Ruth--who at first appear to be ordinary children attending an exclusive and indefinably creepy but otherwise ordinary English boarding school. The only other thing you need to know...
...took me in the room. The Holy Father was lying in his bed, but they had his head propped up with pillows. There were three doctors alongside the bed and his five Polish nuns standing along the wall. [The pope] was having real trouble breathing. But he was perfectly alert. When he saw me I could tell he recognized me, it was like his eyes lit up and then he sort of bowed his head. I went and kneeled at his bedside and kissed his hand. I told him that I had said Mass for him and that the whole...
...suggested higher levels of activity in the more primitive amygdala, where anxiety and alarm are sounded. Shy children, Battaglia concluded, may simply be less adept at reading the facial flickers other kids use as social cues. Unable to rely on those helpful signals, they tend to go on high alert, feeling anxious about any face they can't decipher. "The capacity to interpret faces is one of the most important prerequisites for balanced relationships," Battaglia says...
...issued several warnings over the past decade against the use of keepsake ultrasounds, and last year its consumer magazine went so far as to list an address readers could use to alert compliance officers whenever retail sonographers set up shop in their community. Since then, a few states, including California and Illinois, have proposed legislation banning such ultrasounds. In the meantime, says Copel, "physicians can do a fair amount to blunt the impact of these places." If provided with a blank videotape beforehand, his staff will happily pop it into the VCR and record the sonogram for posterity. Some...
...likely to hit instead of all across the country, as the government does now; how to screen for travelers who may actually pose a risk; and how to divulge information about threats in ways that are useful and not gratuitously alarming. Implicitly criticizing his predecessor's handling of security alerts, Chertoff says wants to keep Americans alert but "guard against crying wolf...