Word: mattering
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...Losing our faculties over a matter like sex ought not to make much sense for a species like ours that relies on its wits. A savanna full of predators, after all, was not a place to get distracted. But the lure of losing our faculties is one of the things that makes sex thrilling-and one of the very things that keeps the species going. As far as your genes are concerned, your principal job while you're alive is to conceive offspring, bring them to adulthood and then obligingly die so you don't consume resources better spent...
...Sprecher now of Illinois State University developed a 15-item questionnaire that ranks people along what the researchers call the passionate-love scale. Hatfield has administered the test in places as varied as the U.S., Pacific islands, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan and, most recently, India and has found that no matter where she looks, it's impossible to squash love. "It seemed only people in the West were goofy enough to marry for passionate love," she says. "But in all of the cultures I've studied, people love wildly...
...Calling something like love mundane, of course, is true only as far as it goes. Survival of a species is a ruthless and reductionist matter, but if staying alive were truly all it was about, might we not have arrived at ways to do it without joy-as we could have developed language without literature, rhythm without song, movement without dance? Romance may be nothing more than reproductive filigree, a bit of decoration that makes us want to perpetuate the species and ensures that we do it right. But nothing could convince a person in love that there...
...Putin has a strategic vision for his country, as Henry Kissinger noted in your interview. While Putin's place in history is still a matter of speculation, the resurgence of Russia is not. It isn't clear whether Russia will become a full-fledged democracy, but it is already much freer than countries like China. It is not by chance that svoboda - freedom - is a much celebrated word in Russia today. Pedro Paulo A. Funari, HEAD, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, STATE UNIVERSITY OF CAMPINAS, BRAZIL...
...Against that backdrop, it may have been only a matter of time before the U.S. became a target in Lebanon once again. As to whether or not the latest attack marks a return to the bad old days for Americans in Beirut, the answer may lie in the outcome of efforts to break Lebanon's political stalemate...