Word: wasps
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...their brief lives, the females of one species of twisted-wing insects called Xenos peckii live inside common paper wasps, feeding on their hosts' innards. Sightless and flightless, these tiny parasites exist only to be impregnated. The luckier males mature inside the wasps, emerge at adulthood and fly away, using their olfactory sense and their eyes to find and mate with a female inside another wasp...
...peckii needs excellent vision in order to prevent its own extinction. "Sex pheromones from females probably help males locate the general neighborhood of a wasp," says Ehmer. But the male, who lives less than 6 hrs. after taking flight, must rely on his eyesight to zero in quickly on that wasp and its female parasite so he can perpetuate his species before he expires...
...more subtle aspects of American culture. Ang Lee has proved himself to be quite an insightful observer of American life, directing both Pushing Hands, a well-told story about a mixed Asian marriage and the cultural struggles it creates, and The Ice Storm, a subtle and powerful film about WASP culture in the '70s. Both films, the latter especially, emphasize the unhappiness and ennui that infects suburban existence. Directed by Sam Mendes, a British theater director, American Beauty continues in this burgeoning tradition, framing, with a keen eye, the miseries and peculiarities of American life...
...Giroux; 406 pages; $27), Nicholas Lemann describes the rise to power of the SAT and the keepers of its flame at the Educational Testing Service. Lemann is especially good at describing the "quiet coup d'etat" that the SAT accomplished in the 1950s and '60s, when it booted the Wasp elite by substituting classroom skills for the old-boy network as the key to college admission...
...understandable. Englander, once Orthodox himself, tells tales out of shul that include the title story, in which a rabbi grants an unhappy husband permission to visit a prostitute. Yet Englander's apostasy is always affectionate and imaginative. The Gilgul of Park Avenue, for example, offers up a Wall Street Wasp who inexplicably discovers that he has a Jewish soul. The domestic and professional ramifications read like a collaboration between Cynthia Ozick and Mel Brooks...