Word: almond
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...parenting, or at least parents, can be cool. The online magazine Babble.com spun off from literary sex journal Nerve com publishes articles by and for parents who can't quite believe they ended up doing something as square as raising a kid. (In his Babble blog Baby Daddy, Steve Almond endearingly refers to his 3-month-old as "the little f___er.") In a typical hipster-parent offering, an edgy novelist, musician or feminist sex writer has a baby--Me! Who'd'a thunk it!--and wrestles to reconcile his or her sensibility with the numbing demands of the cradle...
...response. The violence settles into inevitabilities that seem tribal, and reach into history. In any case, this winter and beyond, as the miserable rains passed and a sweet spring came, with the almond and apricot trees in blossom, the Arabs in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, weary of their humiliations and broken hopes, have risen up to disturb Israel's birthday party, its sometime peace and its dream. For 2,000 years the thought of Zion warmed the minds of the world's scattered Jews. ''Next year in Jerusalem'' -- the prayer ended in an ardent sigh...
...That's the pact that 14 English children unknowingly signed in the fall of 1963 when Michael Apted and Gordon McDougall, two researchers for the Granada TV public affairs show World in Action, selected them to appear in a 40-min. documentary called Seven Up!, directed by Paul Almond. The kids were chosen to represent English classes and regions: Jackie, Lynn and Sue from a London council estate, John, Andrew and Charles from a Kensington boarding school, Paul and Simon (originally spelled Symon) from a charity home, Neil and Peter from a Liverpool suburb, Suzy from a titled family, Nicholas...
...risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain--of mouse and man--is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger--a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger--it's the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that...
...have attended many quiet delivery rooms and I always pause outside the door, offering a quick prayer. Most recently, I was called to see an infant whose physical appearance suggested a diagnosis of Trisomy 21 or Down syndrome. Baby Bobby had almond-shaped eyes, a single crease across each of his palms, and an enlarged tongue. The spaces between his toes were also enlarged and the tone of his muscles was low. A definitive diagnosis required an analysis of his chromosomes and would take days. I joined the parents with Bobby bundled in a blanket and began to point...