Word: drift
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sick, cerebral thrill of ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 241 pages), a dense, fractally complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen, lies in watching a shrink, one of the trusted guardians of consensus reality, drift out of his lane and into oncoming traffic. Over and over again, Leo's finely calibrated mind analyzes the available data and arrives by the most rigorously logical methods at a series of increasingly demented conclusions. Which makes you realize, queasily, how worthless those methods were in the first place...
Villagers will retrieve a corpse from the river if it is recognized as a family member or a neighbor. The bodies of ten babies, all from Myinkakon, washed up in the days following the cyclone and were buried at a nearby cemetery. Unidentified or unidentifiable corpses drift along the river or snag in vegetation along its banks. "Nobody is collecting them," says Myint Swe. "They're just floating around." There is a rumor, repeated by Myint Swe, that soldiers are not burying the dead, but tossing them back in the river. Just a few feet from these corpses there...
...most people, all this will mean reassurance as worrisome symptoms turn out to be nothing at all. "Normal is the new frontier," says Mony de Leon, director of the Center for Brain Health at New York University Tisch Hospital. And for those who do drift beyond that frontier, the same research may offer new hope for treatments and even cures...
...Small's most recent animal studies show that rising glucose levels in turn disrupt the function of the dentate gyrus. That doesn't draw a straight and conclusive line between waistline and memory, but it does suggest one. "It's possible," Small says, "that blood glucose, which tends to drift upward as we get older, is one of the main contributors to age-related memory decline...
...Politics will always be propelled by grease, hot air and showmanship, but in the astonishing prosperity of the late 20th century, we allowed our public life to drift toward too much show biz, too little substance. Yes, the low-information signals - the bowling and tamale-eating - are crucial; politicians have to show that they are in touch with the lives of average folks. But a balance needs to be struck between carnival populism and the higher demands of democracy, and as a nation, we haven't been very good lately with the serious part of the program. As a result...