Word: humanities
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...Atrocity of Human Trafficking As a former prostitute, I found E. Benjamin Skinner's descriptions of the young trafficked girls in South Africa excruciatingly painful [Jan. 18]. I felt their rapes in my memory. Skinner writes about the difficulty of healing after emancipation. But the depth of harm done to these young girls is beyond suffering, and I'm not sure there ever is "emancipation." After they are rescued, what life is there for these girls? Can they ever really recover? Suki Falconberg, SAN FRANCISCO...
...thought provoking [Jan. 18]. I had always considered that natural selection was too slow and random a process to allow the animal kingdom to successfully deal with environmental change. I am now filled with hope and trepidation about the effects that future environmental challenges will have on the human race. If physiological conditioning can have a transient effect on our gene activity, then can sociological conditioning also determine the traits of future genetics such as physical appearance, attraction, sexual orientation, academic and sporting prowess? Are changes in epigenetic marks the driving force or cradle for successful genetic mutations? John Cardiff...
Elad's activities, in the views of its opponents, amounts to turning over Jerusalem's archaeology to extremist Jewish settlers. That has alarmed many Israeli and international scholars, Palestinian officials, and human-rights advocates. On a political level, it complicates efforts by the White House to enable both Palestinians and Israelis to share Jerusalem as their respective capitals, a key demand of the Palestinians. For scholars, it sparks concerns about whether Elad can be independent and objective in its work. And for Jerusalemites it raises a fundamental question: What matters more, the stones and bones of antiquity, or the lives...
...Atrocity of Human Trafficking Thank you for "The New Slave Trade" [Jan. 18]. The tragedy of human trafficking and enslavement still needs much more coverage, and it's encouraging to see it in a prominent publication like TIME. I was sorry to see, however, that human trafficking in the U.S. was not mentioned. There have been cases of trafficking and slavery reported in all 50 states and D.C., and Kevin Bales, founder of Free the Slaves, estimates the number of modern-day slaves in the U.S. to be between 40,000 and 50,000. Leaving out this information allows readers...
...general readers curious about the P.R.C., since many significant works that take a ground-level view of the country, rather than a bird's-eye one, have also been appearing. I am thinking, for example, of Fast Boat to China (2007). This is a lively account of the human side of Shanghai-based outsourcing by Andrew Ross, who usefully dubs his study a foray into "scholarly reporting" - a term for books that, as he puts it, have "mined the overlap between ethnography and journalism...