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...world populated by surprising characters like Billy Brown: "Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life/ Two kids, a dog and a cautionary wife/ And while it was all going accordingly to plan/ Billy Brown fell in love with another man." Though it's taken a lot of pain to construct, it's still a fun world overall, and Mika built it to his own design. It's also big, sometimes overblown, and there are a few too many ingredients for my liking; too many hooks, styles and voices. But it is serious music. Commercial, yes, but original, and far from...
...children in the 1920s. Piaget's work led him to conclude that infants younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works or any sense of "object permanence" (that people and things still exist even when they're not seen). Instead, babies must gradually construct this knowledge from experience. Piaget's "constructivist" theories were massively influential on postwar educators and psychologists, but over the past 20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation of "nativist" psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more sophisticated experiments led them to theorize that infants arrive...
Cavalier cruciverbalsit Kyle A. Mahowald '09 (see story) was kind enough to construct this puzzle for FM's readers. Kyle says he went easy on us with this...
...ideological truth, a vision of pure conservatism that must be pursued at all costs. Emboldened by this presumptive omniscience, the author and Pinochet extend themselves into the arrogant defense of inhuman action to further their personal philosophies. This is the greatest sin of dictators and tyrants, because this simple construct allows for the denial of the rights and humanity of those who stand between the ruler and the achievement of his goal. Whether the despot must murder 3,000 or 11 million to achieve his ends, he will do as he sees fit, because anything is possible once the opponent...
...legacy of that process lies hidden beneath London's streets: 132 km long, the world's most elaborate sewer, which began construction in 1858, was completed in little more than a decade and is still a vital defense for a city that has not recorded a single outbreak of cholera since 1866. It's a testament to Victorian England's ability to construct grand solutions to big problems. That's a skill the modern world could use, says Johnson, noting that some 2 billion people are still at risk because they do not have access to clean water. "Unlike...