Word: commoner
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...Shiva Naipaul, by contrast, merely shares his brother’s resonance and descriptive eye for the evocatively grotesque, notably in the instance of the diseased mendicants on the streets of Nairobi; “Most were maimed. Lepers with truncated arms and legs were a common sight; but even more numerous than the lepers were victims of severe bone malformation, the result of calcium deficiency. This affliction ravages the human frame, reducing it to tangled wreckage of atrophied limbs.”The prose is not merely precise but elegant and memorable, full of acerbic wit and unusual metaphor...
...Whenever Joel is stymied by Suzie's sweatpants, he ends up at the sports bar at the nearby Marriott, the aptly named Sidelines, where his old pal Dean (Ben Affleck, shaggy as a bear) tends bar. Dean believes Xanax is the cure for everything, including the common cold. Their conversations head in absurd directions - Dean thinks Joel should hire a gigolo to seduce Suzie so he can sleep with the alluring Cindy guilt-free, a suggestion that ultimately does more damage than Cindy does - but at the same time have a real naturalism. Imagine Pulp Fiction's Jules and Vincent...
...relevance for research into autism, whose sufferers sometimes have trouble understanding personal space and are thought to have amygdalae impairment. Previous studies of SM show that her brain impairment makes it difficult for her to recognize expressions of fear or judge a person's trustworthiness - problems that are also common among people with autism. Researchers think people who suffer from extreme shyness may turn out to have a problem in their temporal lobes as well. There's no known way of repairing amygdalae, so such conditions can't be reversed. But at least it's now possible to understand...
...turn of the 20th century, Harvard alumnus and Civil War veteran Major Henry Lee Higginson addressed the Harvard community on what he believed it most needed: a common space that all Harvard students could call their own. Higginson argued that the College exists “to furnish fit material for the building up of the Republic…good public and private citizens.” For this task, he reasoned, “equipment is needed, beside teachers, lectures, and books, the freest and fullest intercourse between students.” More than a century later, the major?...
...daunting as the challenge may appear, it behooves the Harvard community to seize the opportunity before us and thereby make the most of our own educations by breathing life back into the major’s vision of an inclusive, democratic common space that all Harvard students can call their...