Word: snakes
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What's special about the amygdala is that it can quickly activate just about every system in the body to fight like the devil or run like crazy. It's not designed to be accurate, just fast. If you have ever gone hiking and been startled by a snake that turned out to be a stick, you can thank your amygdala. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, calls it "the hub in a wheel of fear...
...having mostly traded in mass storytelling for niche storytelling, has supplemented its limited diet of universally appealing programs like the Oscars and the Super Bowl by creating semireal events like The Bachelor and Survivor. Albums are one-week events: platinum albums are no longer achieved after two hit singles snake their way up Casey Kasem's chart but rather in the very first weeks, through promotion, before beginning their swift, inevitable drop. But no one has figured out how to create a blockbuster that generates a national conversation better than Spider...
...going to be internationally famous, this is the way to do it. Jean Auel's books have sold 34 million copies, but she can still walk into Starbucks without turning heads, and unlike a certain teen star with similar pull, she won't be caught prancing around with a snake on her shoulders. Skinning it with a flint knife would be more her style: Auel is the author of the Neolithic saga The Clan of the Cave Bear and its four sequels...
...place? So we can watch animals acting nothing like themselves in a plastic environment? So we can point at orangutans and pretend we're learning something about them when in fact we're simply capitalizing on their misery? So zoo gift shops can sell lots of "I Survived the Snake House" t-shirts? Proponents of zoos say that the public needs to see animals up close so we will be moved to fund habitats around the world. But try telling that to the unlucky beasts who get to waste away in thralldom so other animals half a world away...
...town's old quarter, which on the map looks like a boot giving the fat brown snake of the Mekong a kick in the belly, is a conservationist's paradise: a kind of colonial Disneyland with lane after unspoiled, palm-fringed lane filled with French brick and stucco buildings and teakwood homes that sag with age. On almost every corner and rise sits a temple: there are more than 30, some half a millennium old. The golden sweep of their winglike roofs seems to suspend them in the hazy skies. The place is so photogenic the local Kodak concession must...