Word: descente
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...reconsidered on a Tuesday in mid-May when I walked out of Widener into the space framed by two large columns, the Yard spread before me, the worn marble steps littered with photographers--and then, nearly twenty-four hours later, traced an oddly familiar descent from the colonnade at the Acropolis, prose in hand, with the magnificent view of Athens (and of flocks of photographers) stretching from marble's edge to the shore...
...Taiwan, at this moment, right now, is an island on the brink: of embroilment in superpower conflict, of descent into economic distress, but also of an unprecedented national awakening and cultural flowering of, dare anyone say it, nationhood?not in constitutional terms but, perhaps more importantly, in cultural terms. The 22.2 million Taiwanese?and the rest of Asia as well?have now posited a Taiwan that is so much more than cold war bulwark and superpower pawn. The island that used to be thought of as the un-China, the anti-Mao or, later, the chip fabricator, the hardware producer...
...start down the descent, it slowly dawns on me that I'm home free. I've got some easy skiing, a shooting stop, and then it'll be my LAST LAP. My clever escape plan fades into the background, and I start thinking how I'll celebrate finishing. This reverses the negative cascade of thinking that has engulfed me for the last 10 minutes, and I start feeling positive and having fun. I don't shoot so well (hitting two out of five), but I have a much easier time on the last...
...really deep stuff, you must look to your genes, and Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford, is there to help you. His company, Oxford Ancestors (motto: "We put the Genes in Genealogy"), can identify portions of your DNA that chronicle an unbroken chain of descent back to the Stone Age. All it takes is a swab from the inside of your cheek...
...mitochondria - cell organelles whose genetic makeup is determined by the mother alone - of all native Europeans except the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia reveal descent from one of what Sykes grandly calls "The Seven Daughters of Eve" (the title, incidentally, of his upcoming book to be published in June). He contends that these ancient matriarchs migrated to Europe from Africa via the Middle East or Asia as long as 50,000 years ago, and he has even assigned evocatively mythical names to each one: Ursula, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine, Xenia and Jasmine. He has also delineated rough population histories...