Word: chameleon
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Zurich is about the last place in the world you'd expect to see a red-ruffed lemur or panther chameleon - in the middle of the alpine winter, no less. But the city's zoo on Zurichbergstrasse is a tropical jungle all year round. The 10,000-sq-m greenhouse is one of the world's largest man-made rain forests: its humidity and temperature faithfully re-create the climate and ecosystem of the endangered rain forest on Madagascar's Masoala Peninsula...
Robert K. Lifton, 75, is an unlikely front runner in the tech races. More than two decades ago, this career chameleon was making tracks of a different kind, helping produce Debby Boone's 1977 hit You Light Up My Life. Today he is trying to light up something else. His New York City--based company, Medis Technologies, is one of several World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers developing new ways to deliver clean electricity to homes and cars, not to mention mobile phones and digital cameras. "The market is huge," says Lifton, and he's not exaggerating: he wants to power...
...American military hasn't the imperial tradition to produce a Lawrence of Arabia type--a cross-cultural swashbuckling chameleon who, speaking perfect Arabic, might infiltrate the recruiting grounds of al-Qaeda or bazaars of Tikrit and send home the inside dope. It is a weakness in the war against terrorism. In Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to al-Qaeda (Alfred A. Knopf; 387 pages), the military historian John Keegan half playfully suggests that Western spy shops might study the model of Kipling's culturally ambidextrous...
...real triumph of Taboo, however, is O'Dowd's music and lyrics, among the best I?ve heard on Broadway in the past few seasons. (With the exception of two old hits, Karma Chameleon and Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, all the songs are new.) The show opens with an infectious cabaret number that launches the show as effectively as the Wilkomen number in Cabaret: "I'm known/ In all the wrong places / I'm one of those faces / You'll never forget." The score ranges from Brecht-Weill for the age of irony (Ich Bin Kunst...
...Irishwoman and a Russian. But I do not possess a true cultural identity. I am a mongrel—an improbable amalgam of Midwestern white trash and New York City Jew (which makes for an interesting holiday season, culinarily speaking). Back home, I took my status as a cultural chameleon in stride. In my eastern Massachusetts hometown, where your roots need to extend five generations before you’re counted as native, and where non-natives are branded “wash-ashores” even after fifty years’ residency, my lack of cultural identity didn?...