dominant genes from the other. Asexual
organisms, contrast, perform a kind of incest. That is why sex and all that goes with it makes sense to scientists, if not to others.
Chaos "Chaos Theory: How Big an Advance?" by Robert Pool, in Sci-ence (July 7, 1989), 1333 H St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
Chaos has crept into science. A century af-ter "chaos theory" was first hinted at by the French mathematician Henri Poincar6 (1854-1912), scientists are debating whether it heralds...
a pleasant ritual: With an absinthe spoon, the drinker held a sugar cube over a small quantity of the liqueur and poured water over the cube to dilute the drink's bitter taste. Like most of the drugs that came after it, ab- sinthe was said to be an aphrodisiac. As the poet Ernest Dowson put it, "absinthe makes the tart grow fonder." The liqueur was immortalized in paintings such as Edouard Manet's The Absinthe Drinker and championed the poets Charles Baude- laire and Arthur Rimbaud. The...
VDTs-suffered ab-normalities. The experts who testified be- fore Congress in 1981 had lacked equip- ment capable of detecting ELF emissions. The U.S. and Canadian press reported none of this.
And so it went. Every new study point- ing to hazards was dismissed other ex- perts-or in the case of important re-search sponsored by IBM in 1984, Brodeur contends, was misrepresented by corporate spokesmen. The Reagan admin- istration delayed a government research effort. Newspaper publishers and editors,...
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in An in AmericaGauguin'sMyth (July 1989), 542 Pacific Ave., Marion, Ohio 43306.
Paul Gauguin's life (1848-1903) "is the stuff of which potent cultural fantasies are created. And indeed have been."
The tale is now well-known, writes Solo- mon-Godeau, an art historian. In 1886, the 38-year-old former stockbroker cast off his bourgeois existence, deserting his wife and five children in Copenhagen to paint full
Paul Ga~~guin's
Parau na te Varua ino (Words of t...
Jacques Barzun, in The Aineri- can Scholar (Summer 19891, 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20009.
According to contemporary etiquette, one of the highest compliments a person can pay another is to call him "creative."
Creativity is "incessantly invoked, praised, urged, demanded, hoped for, de- clared achieved, or found lacking," ob- serves Banun, a professor emeritus at Co- lumbia. Political campaigns are criticized for "lacking in creativity,' successful busi- nessmen...
Jacques Barzun, in The Aineri- can Scholar (Summer 19891, 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20009.
According to contemporary etiquette, one of the highest compliments a person can pay another is to call him "creative."
Creativity is "incessantly invoked, praised, urged, demanded, hoped for, de- clared achieved, or found lacking," ob- serves Banun, a professor emeritus at Co- lumbia. Political campaigns are criticized for "lacking in creativity,' successful busi- nessmen...
T. J. Clark, Rob- ert L. Herbert, and others "from concern with formal qualities to subject matter and its social context," writes Flam. These scholars have argued that the impression- ists were united less the way they wielded their brushes than by their atti- tudes towards modern life and their themes-generally, spectacle and urban leisure. Thus, several artists traditionally placed on the periphery of impressionism (Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Edouard Ma- net, and Berthe Morisot) have...
Peter Schneider, in The New York Times Magazine (June 25, 1989), 229 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Ronald Reagan exclaimed in 1987 as he stood before the Berlin Wall. He was repeating a demand that virtually every Western leader has made-implic- itly, a call for the reunification of the two Germanys-during the 28 years of the wall's existence.
What if Gorbachev did it?
Reagan, his successor, and America's al- lies in Western Europe...
democratic merely "preserves the illusion that the wall reforms in the East, not "some utopian is the only thing dividing the Germans."
El Salvador's War "El Salvador's Forgotten War" James LeMoyne, in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1989), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Guerrilla war broke out in El Salvador nine years ago, and LeMoyne, a New York Times reporter who has covered the coun- try since 1982, doubts that it will end for at least another decade.
Five reasonably...
Cuba and Nicaragua. The rebels have inflicted some $2 billion in damage, nearly canceling out the $3.3 bil-lion in aid (not counting covert grants) provided Washington during the 1980s. Captured rebel documents show that the FMLN is bent on military victory. It re-gards participation in peace talks only as war by other means.
U.S.-provided arms and aerial gunships have helped the army force the guerrillas to operate in groups of five to 20 men, rather than company- and battalion-size units, but...