Word: humanity
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...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. The writing illuminates not only the landscape and the people in general, but also a succession of unforgettable characters that illustrate...
...hour filling out the online form, sent off an e-mail and got this response: "We are sorry but this service is unavailable at this time. Please try again later." I managed to send the e-mail on a second try the next day. Still, I wanted a live human being to hear my case sooner. I called the main reservations line and wheedled a number at Delta's corporate headquarters in Atlanta. But that only elicited a brusque gentleman who quickly swatted away my complaint. "That is Delta Airlines policy," he said. "You just don't like the policy...
...least, that's the way it used to be. The major carriers have, quietly, made it steadily more difficult to air your complaints to a live human being. "The airlines don't want to talk to their customers," says John Tschohl, a consultant to businesses on customer service. American Airlines stopped taking customer complaints by phone several years ago, according to a spokesperson; putting the complaint in writing, he insisted, is more efficient. United used to have a customer-support number but dropped it "some months ago," according to a reservations agent. (A corporate spokesperson didn't return several phone...
...David Schindler, a partner at Latham & Watkins who specializes in white collar and government investigations, says "human frailty" will always be a factor, and that would hold true even if tougher regulations and oversights had been in force over the past decade. "When you're a regulator and you get an allegation of wrongdoing [regarding] somebody who occupied the position in Nasdaq that Madoff did at that time, the human condition is such that it might be hard for somebody to start investigating or shooting at someone of his stature [knowing that] if they're wrong, their career and others...
...that the amygdalae in those individuals lit up when the participants were told that an experimenter was standing close to them, even if the participants couldn't actually see, hear, smell or in any way sense the experimenter. In short, that suggests that we are wired to repel close human contact - except, of course, when sex is a possibility. Which explains why so many introductions in bars go wrong. One party's amygdalae gets primed by proximity even as the other party's amygdalae submit to a more primal force: the need to procreate. (Past research has shown that...