Word: ratting
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Psychologists and other social scientists study the actions and reactions of the albino rat to learn about human behavior. Now a University of Wash ington psychologist, Robert B. Lockard, suggests in American Psychologist that the laboratory lessons may be invalid, and that the rats do not prove much about people. The reason is that the albino rat-a mutant form of the wild brown rat-is a genetic monster of dubious value to research. Caged and bred in captivity for more than a century, it is a man-made abomination-fat and degenerate, faithful neither to its wild ancestry...
Across the Volga. According to Lockard, several factors disqualify the rat as an experimental animal. The first is that the laboratory rat, originally Rattus norvegicus and an indigene of Asia, crossed the Volga River into Europe only 250 years ago. On history's ample scale, it is a newcomer; its rapid diffusion, combined with rapid breeding, makes of the Norway rat an animal that is still in violent evolutionary motion. To arrest it, as in the laboratory, says Lockard, is to claim validity for a motion-picture still...
JULES WITCOVER'S 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy is unfortunately merely a summary of the traditional reportage. It is exciting to view a presidential campaign from that rat-race of a pressure box--the press bus or plane. The daily wanderings of Robert Kennedy, while fascinating for trivia buffs and future students of the style of American political life in the late 1960's, just aren't of over-riding import when one is trying to understand the nature of that brief and turbulent campaign of last spring. Witcover mentions the commercial TV campaign twice--and then...
...letters, however, Kazantzakis settles for a shrewder, certainly earthier judgment of himself. "I am not a Romantic in revolt," he wrote, "nor a mystic scorning life, nor an insolent belligerent against Substance. I do not feel possessed by any illusion. I enter into all traps-like some extremely elastic rat, which enters the trap, eats the mixture set to catch it, and then goes on to other traps, well aware that the last trap-the trap of Death-is there waiting...
...Dead Rat on a Plate. Seven months later, at a poetry reading at Queens College in New York, the poet replied to a student who asked him what he thought of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial: "Your question is like inviting someone to dinner and then putting a dead rat on his plate." In 1968, while a number of Russian intellectuals were being tried on patently fabricated charges, Evtushenko was on a three-month tour of Latin America. At a Mexico City press conference, he repeated his attacks on Sinyavsky and Daniel, now adding that other imprisoned writers were involved...