Beauty and the Blue Bottle Fly

… lay their eggs (hundreds at a time), first in the eyes, nostrils, and mouth, or first in a bloody wound. Their eggs hatch larvae (maggots). The maggots feed on dead flesh, and when they are fat and full, they encase their slimy macaroni bodies in pupal casings and morph into flies. Perhaps blue bottle flies …

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Our Life’s Purpose

… Some think they are a cause of hair loss, but many people with no hair loss host this mite, which lives head down in the follicle and feeds on dead skin and skin secretions.
How gross. And here is my life being put to a purpose I did not vote on. Okay. I know I …

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John Brown’s Folly

… Brown’s scheme: his plan, which never stayed set for very long, was ill conceived from the get-go; he never tackled basic questions, like how to feed the flock of slaves who would presumably rush to his side; he never arranged to transport the huge cache of armory weapons he intended to seize; he …

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The Psychologist

… one.” We take this appeal to shared experience for granted. Recognizing shared experience, and wanting to, are at the basis of fiction, and the social life fiction feeds on. But psychology should do more than just take these facts for granted: it should help us explain them.
Mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s, fire in …

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Out in the West

… understand the origins of hatred because of how bright my own anger glowed in the first few years I lived here. I understand how fear gets fueled, feeds on itself, becomes such a dark and scary thing that it suffocates any possibility of conversation, any possibility of change. At the moment I slammed the door …

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Making Sparks Fly

… involve welding. Elias was an eager participant, watching intently as his instructor laid out a problem, volunteering answers—some right, some wrong—then taking the instructor’s feedback and looking down at the page, calculating again.
Elias’s mathematical knowledge upon entering the program was at about the level of adding and subtracting simple fractions …

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The Mexican Border: Crossing a Cultural Divide

… white, but the reality along the border has long been a messy canvas splashed with color. This world has attracted drifters, artists, and opportunists throughout its history, feeding the fluidity of identity. Meanwhile, the monochromatic vision is being imposed by circumstances real and imagined. I’d been down to Mexico many times in the past …

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Resistance

… suffocating tube, without the liquid food going in and out of my body and without the gag between my teeth. … I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the cell next to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howey, I was sure. When the ghastly process was over …

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Plucked from the Grave

… the grasses around the compound in order to introduce the Indians to the plow, to dig irrigation ditches, and to make way for expansive gardens that would feed his family and a growing number of white pioneer visitors. He yanked up the rushes and planted wheat, built a mill. In her writings, Narcissa, without a …

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A Speck of Showmanship

… with constant turnover of their short-lived casts and sometimes encountered customs problems when ordering special fleas from exotic places. Some demonstrated how they let their performers feed regularly on their forearms, and transported them from gig to gig in custom-built luggage. So historically, yes—there have been fleas in flea circuses, though whether …

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