Mcauliffe Quotes

Hey Pudge," the Colonel said. "What do you think of a truce?" "It reminds me of when the Germans demanded that the U.S. surrender at the Battle of the Bulge," I said. "I guess I'd say to this truce offer what General McAuliffe said to that one: Nuts.

Men, we are surrounded by the enemy. We have the greatest opportunity ever presented an army. We can attack in any direction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight. We've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle. But they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together. For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge, and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us. We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers. And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them. I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA, or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it." There's a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God." Thank you.

NUTS! (In response to demands to surrender Bastogne, Belgium during WWII.)

Dennis McAuliffe Jr., an Osage tribal member and an editor at the Washington Post, is the author of The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation.

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on. —Christa McAuliffe, Challenger astronaut

Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age.

Save for the ancient Egyptians, he found, virtually no one kept cats as pets until the latter part of the 1700s. The first people to embrace the practice “were poets—avant-garde, left-wing types in Paris and London, and it just came to be the thing to do.” They called it the “cat craze,” and coinciding with it, the incidence of schizophrenia rose sharply.

To varying degrees, scientists now suspect, intestinal microbes influence whether you’re happy or sad, anxious or calm, energetic or sluggish, and, by signaling the brain when you’ve had enough to eat, perhaps even whether you’re fat or thin.

Rodin was on the brink of a grand passion. But unlike Bernhardt’s, his lover would become the greatest inspiration of his career. Her name was Camille Claudel, and if she was not pretty in a conventional way, she was as beautiful and alive as quicksilver. She was also an extraordinarily gifted sculptor in her own right.

In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties or invite a bunch of people over,” reported Reiber.

A few minutes later McAuliffe was woken again. He was told that the Germans demanded a formal written reply. They had brought a note, so now it was up to the Americans to do the same. McAuliffe was in a quandary; he had never been in a situation like this before. ‘I don’t know what the hell to say to them’, he snorted in disgust. ‘How about that first remark of yours?’ one of his officers suggested in a half-joking manner. ‘That would be pretty hard to beat.’ The suggestion was greeted with laughter and general agreement. However, McAuliffe, conscious of his new position as ‘American Commandant of the Besieged City of Bastogne’, thought he had to do better than a profanity. In the end he compromised on the one word that would go round the free world this third week of December 1944. Thus the message was returned to Lt Henke and the staff major. It read: ‘To the German commander, Nuts. From the American Commander.

The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.

Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L’assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet’s painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale. Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it.

In the meantime, he anxiously awaited visitors, and on occasion even attempted some visits of his own—including one to his nearby Bellevue neighbor, the charming and notorious courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne. Red-haired and beautiful, Valtesse de la Bigne had brought several rich and titled men to financial ruin. She had also captivated some of the most sophisticated men in town, including Manet, who referred to her as “la belle Valtesse” and had painted her the year before. Born Louise Emilie Delabigne, Valtesse de la Bigne was sufficiently intelligent and charming to draw an entourage of admiring writers and artists such as Manet. Zola also paid court to Valtesse—although in his case from a desire to get the characters and setting right for his upcoming novel Nana. Flattered by his journalistic interest, Valtesse even agreed to show him her bedroom—until then off-limits to all but her most highly paying patrons. Zola (who seems to have limited his visit to note taking) used her over-the-top boudoir as the model for Nana’s bedroom. Even if the fictional Nana was nowhere near the sophisticated creature that Valtesse had become, the bed said it all. It was “a bed such as had never existed before,” Zola wrote, “a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.

Many prominent families were affected by this disaster and would in time build the beautiful chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation on the spot, as a memorial to their lost loved ones.

Pioneers do not as a rule settle for the comfortable corners of life, and Maria Sklodowska was no exception.

When the struggling young painter Rodolphe Salis opened Le Chat Noir in 1881, he had no idea that he was about to make history.

Le Chat Noir’s clientele were looking for good times, to be sure, but their idea of a good time was a convivial (and well-lubricated) evening based on shared intellectual and cultural interests.

In his Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust would model his Baron de Charlus on Montesquiou, just as he would base the Princess Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin on Misia, the actress Berma on Sarah Bernhardt, and elements of the character of Bergotte on Prince Edmond de Polignac (although more on Anatole France).

Escoffier reduced the number of courses, developed the à la carte menu, introduced lighter sauces, and eliminated the most ostentatious of the food displays. He also simplified the menu and completely reorganized the professional kitchen, integrating it into a single unit. Women approved, and he approved of them, creating dishes for some of his most famous diners, including Sarah Bernhardt (Fraises Sarah Bernhardt) and the Australian singer Nellie Melba, who garnered two creations in her honor—Peach Melba and Melba Toast.

ever since Eugène Poubelle had become prefect of the Seine and issued strict laws governing street cleaning and garbage collection (thus giving his name to the French trash can).

For years Matisse had battled his conflicting impulses, between commercially viable conservatism and something else, although he had not yet grasped what that something else was. Earlier that year he had helped organize the first official exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works, as part of the Salon des Indépendants—certainly an influence, for he later gave credit to van Gogh as well as Gauguin for his summer breakthrough. But it was the little fishing village of Collioure that dazzled him with color and light, and drove him to take more risks than ever before. Two summers in the south of France had exposed this northerner to vibrant color, and he responded ardently, even gratefully. Collioure radiated color and light, but it also exuded an element of savagery, for there was a fierce primitivism in this Catalan town that expressed itself in the explosive colors and contrasts of Fauvism, so unlike the gentler colors of the Impressionists. Embracing Gauguin’s insistence that art should primarily communicate emotion, Matisse forged ahead, daring all by rejecting art as representation, and producing works of shattering impact.

On December 22, General McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne in Bastogne received a pretty long letter from the German commander, asking him to surrender the town or be destroyed. McAuliffe’s reply was just one word: Nuts! Then he handed the paper back to the German messenger. The dude looked at it, didn’t understand, and asked

McAuliffe emerges from Charlottesville crisis as a counterbalance to Trump.

ordinary people acting together for common goals have accomplished incredible amounts. There is nothing magical about making social change happen. What is required is a sense of hope that it is possible to make a difference and some understanding of the world that helps orient our choices about what kinds of actions to take.

I convinced my wife to go on a romantic holiday in the area because there was a hotel with a very nice restaurant with foie gras, and a hot-water spa nearby,” Thomas told me. A mischievous smile spread across his face as he relayed this, hinting that he might have brought her there under false pretenses. After they had a lovely meal, he went on, he did not retire to the hotel room with her but retrieved test tubes from the trunk of his car and returned to stake out the pool.

Presently, the probiotics in foods like yogurt are chosen by companies based on consumers’ taste preferences and other commercial considerations, so trying to harness them for therapeutic purposes, said Cryan, is “like going into a pharmacy and picking random pills hoping that they’ll affect the brain in a beneficial way.

Interestingly, cattle and horses, which can’t lick their own penises, are much more prone to STDs—one of the reasons, according to the Harts, they’re bred by artificial insemination. Humans, they add, are also very susceptible to STDs, possibly owing to similar anatomical limitations. Lactating

insufficient sleep immediately before or after receiving a vaccine reduces the body’s immune response by half, greatly diminishing the protective benefits of inoculation—something to keep in mind when you’re due for your next flu shot.

Intriguingly, several studies indicate that lowering concerns about the risk of infection—for example, by vaccinating subjects—can effectively shut down the behavioral immune system, suppressing prejudicial feelings that would otherwise arise when the threat of contagious disease is made salient. In one notable experiment, being allowed to use an antibacterial wipe to disinfect hands when reminded that the flu was going around decreased negative attitudes toward a variety of perceived outgroups, including illegal immigrants, Muslims, the obese, and the disabled—and the reduction was most dramatic in the germaphobic. Ackerman, one of the experimenters, aptly refers to this phenomenon as “washing away prejudice.” Political

Pizarro and other groups suggests that the readily revolted are more likely to hold stable political views at the conservative end of the spectrum—and

Countries under severe parasite stress were more likely to be controlled by dictators; gender inequality was pronounced, and wealth tended to be concentrated in the hands of a small class of elites. In contrast, countries with the least amount of infectious disease had wealth more equitably distributed; their women were on a more equal footing with men, and individual rights were far more extensive. They were overwhelmingly democracies. If

a study of people serving as mock jurors found that those highly prone to disgust were more inclined to judge ambiguous evidence as proof of criminal wrongdoing, to impose stiffer sentences, and to see the suspect as wicked. Compared to their less easily revolted counterparts, they were also more prone to harboring an exaggerated sense of the prevalence of crime in their own neighborhoods.

By investing more in health care up front, Thornhill’s model predicts, Western countries might not have to spend so much on warfare later—and may ultimately reduce human suffering far more effectively. A

In an article published in 1998 in the normally staid pages of Neurology, the Spanish physician Juan Gómez-Alonso pointed out other, less obvious parallels between vampires and rabid animals. According to folklore, the lifespan of a vampire was forty days, which coincides with the average time a victim lives after being bitten by a rabid animal. And just like rabid people, vampires were repelled by light (hence their nocturnal habits), strong smells (the odor of garlic, according to folktales, could ward them off), and water (pouring it around graves was recommended to keep them in their underground vaults).

After being shown pictures of people coughing, cartoonish germs sprouting from a sponge, and similar infection-evoking images, women—the sex most vulnerable to STDs—endorsed more conservative sexual values than those who were reminded of other types of threats. And both men and women expressed a stronger intent to use condoms during sex if, as they filled out a survey, they were clandestinely exposed to a rank odor.

Consumers even avoid buying items placed near a product with icky connotations. Grocery shoppers, for instance, have been shown to be repelled by foods—including goodies like cookies—if those items come within an inch of touching garbage bags, diapers, or other products associated with filth or bodily waste.

What would happen if the parasites were removed from this picture? Would there be fewer birds in the sky, more fish in the sea? Lafferty doesn’t know, but the change would almost certainly have a domino-like effect on the food chain. In some fragile ecosystems where animals struggle to get by on scarce resources, manipulative parasites might even tip the balance toward the survival or extinction of a species. Lafferty recounted joining Japanese biologists who were studying a type of endangered trout in hopes of increasing its numbers. In the fall, the team noticed, the fish were unusually well nourished; their bellies were packed full of crickets. What had made this source of nutrients suddenly so plentiful? A hairworm closely related to the species Thomas has long been studying was sending droves of the crickets into the water in late summer. If it weren’t for the parasite, said Lafferty, it’s possible the trout might already be extinct.

We were seated in a sparkling new building on the UBC campus with austere modern lines and sleek, minimalist décor—about as sterile a setting as one could imagine. “We don’t really worry much about infectious disease. We forget that in most of the world and throughout most of our history, infectious organisms have posed this extraordinary health threat and have almost certainly played a huge role in human evolution, including the evolution of our brain and nervous system.

Putting this all together, Moore and Reiber predicted that the germ would prod people to seek out the company of others early in the infection, before it had blown its cover and triggered a counterattack by defense cells. Once they’d formulated a hypothesis, they decided it would be wise to conduct a pilot trial to see if the idea had any merit. The researchers tracked the social interactions of thirty-six people—none of whom knew the purpose of the study—before and after they got flu shots at a health clinic on the Binghamton campus. The change in the subjects’ behavior was huge, so notable that its magnitude surprised even Reiber and Moore. In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties or invite a bunch of people over,” reported Reiber. “This happened with lots of our subjects. It wasn’t just one or two oddities.

Lest anyone doubt that sickness behavior is a defense against pathogens, scientists can induce it without exposing animals to a single germ. They manage this simply by injecting healthy rodents with immune components called cytokines. The once-frisky animals refuse to eat or drink and lose their passion for running in their wheels. Up go their temperatures and down go their heads. They act and feel sick even though they’re healthy.

A phenomenon known as sympathetic vomiting occurs when the sight of someone throwing up causes others to do so too. Such copycat behavior probably evolved to protect us from food poisoning, a hazard that was both more common and more lethal in generations past.

Good looks, for example, are denoted by symmetrical features—a sign that early life development was not disrupted by infection—and skin that shows no trace of pockmarks, sores, or other blemishes. With that in mind, you’d expect beauty to be more valued by those more susceptible to germs—a theory that evolutionary biologists put to the test in a survey of over seventy-one hundred people on six continents. In keeping with their prediction, those who lived in countries where parasites were leading causes of death and disability—in Nigeria and Brazil, for example—deemed good looks much more important in a mate than did inhabitants of nations like Finland and the Netherlands, which have among the lowest incidences of infection. In a British study, merely prompting people to think of germs—by, for example, showing them photos of a festering skin sore or a white cloth with a dark stain resembling a fecal smear—boosted how much they preferred symmetrical faces in the opposite sex.

Nonetheless, studies by Schaller and other researchers indicate that people who chronically worry about disease are especially prone to antipathy toward those whose appearances diverge from the “normal” template, and these people have a harder time moving beyond that reaction.

The recently ill display similar biases, possibly, Schaller theorizes, because their immune systems may still be run-down, so their minds compensate by ratcheting up behavioral defenses. In support of that contention, he points to a provocative study by evolutionary biologist Daniel Fessler and colleagues, who showed that pregnant women become more xenophobic in the first trimester, when their immune systems are suppressed to prevent rejection of the fetus, but not in later stages of gestation, when that danger has passed.

Xenophobic propaganda can take another sinister form. Its progenitor is that favorite taunt of the playground bully: “You’ve got cooties.” Grown-up bullies are notorious for fomenting hatred by branding the target of their aggression—usually a vulnerable minority—a parasite or other vehicle for transmitting infection. This tradition has deep roots. The ancient Romans vilified outsiders as detritus and scum. Jews—history’s favorite scapegoats—were depicted by the Nazis as leeches on society, setting the stage for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, in the United States, law-abiding Japanese American civilians were called “yellow vermin”—a slur that became a rallying cry for imprisoning them in internment camps. In 1994, Rwanda erupted in a genocidal bloodbath when Hutu extremists incited their followers to “exterminate the Tutsi cockroaches.

By enlisting the assistance of a team of neuroimmunologists, however, Schaller succeeded in conducting one of the few studies to address the question. As in many of his previous trials, subjects were shown a disease-y slide show, but with one major difference: Immediately before and after the presentation, their blood was drawn and mixed in a test tube with a pathogen surface marker to determine how aggressively their white blood cells countered the challenger. Specifically, the investigators looked to see if arousing subjects’ disgust spurred their white blood cells to produce higher amounts of a pathogen-fighting substance called interleukin 6 (IL-6). It did—and by a whopping 24 percent.

When subjects in one of Pizarro’s studies were shown a sign recommending the use of hand wipes, he reported, they were harsher in their judgment of a girl who masturbated while clutching a teddy bear and a man who had sex in his grandmother’s bed while housesitting for her.

Vast populations in parasitic hot zones are without hospitals, doctors, drugs, or surgical equipment. Meanwhile, often directed at the very same underserved regions, wealthy countries are throwing billions of dollars into campaigns aimed at containing wars ignited by ethnic hatred and religious intolerance, not to mention dealing with the refugee crises and other tragedies this violence has spawned. By investing more in health care up front, Thornhill’s model predicts, Western countries might not have to spend so much on warfare later—and may ultimately reduce human suffering far more effectively.

I decided to call Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe for advice on getting the DNC back on its feet. I knew he’d just be getting out of church. “Terry,” I said. “I’m sitting here in Debbie’s office about to meet the staff. What should I do?” “Paint that damn office blue!” he said. I guess he didn’t like her Florida pink walls any more than I did. I knew I’d keep some part of the office pink out of respect for Debbie, who was a breast cancer survivor.

In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated.

Spiders are by no means the only creatures that need to fear the parasitic wasps’ coercive tactics. And drugs are not the wasps’ only weapons for gaining the compliance of their victims. Ampulex compressa, better known as the jewel wasp because of its iridescent blue-green sheen, performs neurosurgery to achieve its aims. Its quarry is the annoyingly familiar American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). Not to be confused with the comparatively diminutive German roach common up north, this species prefers warmer climes and can grow as big as a mouse. Though dwarfed in stature by its prey, a female jewel wasp that has caught the scent of an American roach will aggressively pursue and attack it—even if that means following the fleeing insect into a house. The roach puts up a mighty struggle, flailing its legs and tucking in its head to fend off the attack, but usually to no avail. With lightning speed, the wasp stings the roach’s midsection, injecting an agent that will temporarily paralyze it so that the behemoth will stay still for the delicate procedure to follow. Like an evil doctor wielding a syringe, she again inserts her stinger, this time into the roach’s brain, and gingerly moves it around for half a minute or so until she finds exactly the right spot, whereupon she injects a venom. Shortly thereafter, the paralytic agent delivered by the first sting wears off. In spite of having full use of its limbs and the same ability to sense its surroundings as any normal roach, it’s strangely submissive. The venom, according to Frederic Libersat, a neuroethologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, has turned the roach into a “zombie” that will henceforth take its orders from the wasp and willingly tolerate her abuse. Indeed, the roach doesn’t protest in the least when she twists off part of one of its antennae with her powerful mandible and proceeds to suck the liquid oozing from it like soda from a straw. The wasp then does the same thing to its other antenna and, assured that the roach will go nowhere, leaves it alone for about twenty minutes as she searches for a burrow where she’ll lay an egg to be nourished by the roach. Meanwhile, her brainwashed slave busies itself grooming—picking fungal spores, tiny worms, and other parasites off itself—providing a sterile surface for the wasp to glue its egg. When the wasp returns, she seizes the roach by the stump of one of its antennae and “walks it like a dog on a leash to her burrow,” said Libersat. Thanks to its cooperation, she doesn’t have to waste energy dragging the massive roach. Equally important, he said, she doesn’t “need to paralyze all the respiratory system, so the thing will stay alive and fresh. Her larvae need to feed five or six days on this fresh meat, which you don’t want to rot.” The

I touch the future.. I Teach..!

The psychologists Peter Blake and Katherine McAuliffe paired up four- to eight-year-olds who had never met, placing them in front of a special apparatus that was set up to distribute two trays of candy. One of the children had access to a lever that gave her the choice either to tilt the trays toward herself and the other child (so that each child got whatever amount of candy was on the nearest tray) or to dump both trays (so that nobody got any candy). When there was an equal amount of candy in each tray, the children almost never dumped. They also almost never dumped when the distribution favored themselves—say, four candies on their tray, and one candy on the other child’s tray—though some of the eight-year-olds did reject this choice. But when this distribution was reversed to favor the other child, children at every age group frequently chose to dump both trays. They would rather get nothing than have another child, a stranger, get more than they did.

At that moment Bastogne was under siege by two of Hitler’s most dashing generals, Fritz Bayerlein of Afrika Korps fame, and Patton’s old adversary at Argentan, the famed cavalryman, General von Liittwitz, who were charged with reducing this obstacle without delay. Assuming that McAuliffe’s fate was sealed inside the ring, Bayerlein decided on a dramatic gesture. He sent a four-man delegation with a white flag of truce into the fortress, demanding that the defenders surrender. When their spiel was translated to McAuliffe, he answered with a single word that was to electrify the Allied armies in the whole of the Bulge. “Nuts!” he said and had the puzzled Germans (who did not know what the idiom meant) escorted back to their line.

I personally believe in the power of second chances.

I am from the generation of children that watched NASA kill a school teacher on live television.

Degas, the most conservative of the group, was adamantly anti-Dreyfus and adamantly anti-Semitic as well.

Renoir, as it turned out, was also deeply anti-Semitic.

Esterhazy’s nephew Christian, unexpectedly showed up. Esterhazy had bilked Christian of large sums, and Christian was eager to spill the beans on his reprehensible uncle.

addition to Debussy, Ravel had begun to attract the interest of patrons such as the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, to whom he dedicated the Pavane pour une Infante défunte, and Misia Natanson, who became a lifelong devotee.

Death would soon carry off Zola as well, although in his case the suspicion existed, and still exists, that he was murdered. No concrete evidence was ever produced to prove this, and yet the circumstances of his death were sufficiently odd to encourage speculation.

the time of World War I, the Eiffel Tower provided the basis for communication with Berlin, Casablanca, and North America, and allowed the army to intercept enemy messages, including the famous intercept that led to the arrest and conviction of the German spy Mata Hari.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party’s more or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.

Predators, in her view, may not always be the supreme hunters nature documentaries suggest they are. A significant portion of their catch of the day may be low-hanging fruit brought within their reach courtesy of parasites.

An undiscovered universe of animal behavior will yet be traced to parasites. Their meddling, in her view, is just harder to prove in some species than others.

An outstanding example is the flatworm Leucochloridium, a favorite of parasitologists since the 1930s for reasons that will soon become obvious. The parasite replicates inside a bird’s digestive system and gets excreted in its waste, so

To figure out how the parasite could coax its host into acting so imprudently, he and graduate student Jenny Shaw analyzed the neurochemistry of infected fish. They found that the parasite was disrupting the regulation of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that influences the anxiety level of many animals, including humans (the popular antidepressant Prozac increases serotonin levels in the brain).

Those who harbored the parasite had significantly slower reaction times. Closer analysis of the data revealed that infected people’s performance began to deteriorate a few minutes into the task as their attention began to wander—an observation that set him thinking about whether they might be a danger behind the wheel of a car. Safe driving, after all, requires constant vigilance and a quick response to changing road conditions.

In contrast to uninfected people, both men and women with the protozoan were much more likely to believe that they could be controlled through hypnosis. They also were far more inclined to report reacting slowly or passively to imminent threats and experiencing little or no fear in dangerous situations.

Flegr told me he himself had just completed a study on the same topic that exploited brain-imaging technology not available in Jírovec’s day. When we were seated again in his office, he handed me a copy of the newly published paper. Only forty-four people with schizophrenia participated in the trial, but small as it was, there was nothing ambiguous about the results. Based on MRI scans, twelve of them had missing gray matter in parts of their cerebral cortex—a puzzling but not uncommon feature of the disease—and they alone had the parasite. I shot him a raised-eyebrow look that said Yikes! and he replied, “Jiří had the same response.

By tinkering with the settings of the cricket’s visual system, he believes, the worm mesmerizes its host. It’s effectively whispering to the insect, “Go toward the light.

Perhaps, for example, a better understanding of the odors that stir insect pests into a feeding frenzy might suggest how to combat them with a subversive form of aromatherapy—a trap consisting of fragrances more attractive to mosquitoes than the human body’s bouquet. Or knowledge of the genes a parasite activates to enhance a mosquito’s sensitivity to human odor might suggest a way to block its functioning, cutting the insect off from the world of scents—the bug equivalent of a person being rendered blind or deaf.

such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and—more important—the money of these coveted constituencies, “New Democrats” think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as “class warfare” and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party’s very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where’s the soft money in that?

he rated McAuliffe the most well-adjusted of them all. “I know this doesn’t sound very scientific,” he said, “but I think she’s neat.

To men and women across the United States, the almost ideal diversity of the Challenger crew-"one of everything"-may have been enough to make the tragedy seem personal. Yet five of the seven were trained astronauts, and all but one were aerospace professionals, each of whom had understood and accepted the risks inherent in their mission. Christa McAuliffe was different. Not only had she captivated the attention of the nation's schoolchildren, but she had embodied the hopes of all those adults who believed, however remotely, that her journey was bringing the Walter Mitty fantasy of citizen spaceflight within their grasp. More than anything else, the poignant public death of the world's first Everyman astronaut made the loss of Challenger a shared tragedy: an instant-replay televised martyrdom in which everyone watching played a part.

oblique hints that the 4th Armored should get a move on. Thus, at the close of the 23d McAuliffe sent the message: "Sorry I did not get to shake hands today. I was disappointed." A less formal exhortation from one of his staff reached the 4th Armored command post at midnight: "There is only one more shopping day before Christmas!

Among these adventurers, the most stylish chose the latest in luxurious transportation, the Orient Express. Paris by now boasted six large train stations. These stood, and still stand, as the termini for tracks that radiate outward from the city like ever-extending spokes of a wheel. The first, the Gare Saint-Lazare (8th), was inaugurated in 1837 and originally served Paris’s western suburbs before reaching north into Normandy. The Gare d’Austerlitz (13th) connects Paris with southwest France and Spain. Its neighbor on the Left Bank, the Gare Montparnasse (15th), is the terminus for trains to Brittany and western France. The Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, near neighbors in north-central Paris (10th), were built to serve northern and eastern France as well as international destinations beyond. And the Gare de Lyon (12th), whose first station on this site opened in 1849, stands across the Seine from the Gare d’Austerlitz, where it connects Paris to southern France, Switzerland, and Italy. Eventually, the Orient Express would depart from the Gare de Lyon under the name of the Simplon Orient Express. But when the first Orient Express left Paris for Vienna in June 1883, it was from the Gare de l’Est. Soon after, the route was extended all the way to Istanbul.

For he was their Victor Hugo. And his Paris, the Paris of Esmeralda and Jean Valjean, would live forever.

Notre-Dame’s neighborhood has of course vastly improved since Victor Hugo’s day, although Bishop Sully certainly would not recognize Baron Haussmann’s vastly expanded parvis. Still, if you can catch a glimpse of Notre-Dame’s spire from the ancient Rue des Chantres or Place Maubert, and then follow the narrowest lanes you can find to the great cathedral’s western portals, you will be treading the path that countless medieval students and clerics have taken before you. And then look up, and up, relishing this direct link with a distant past. Here is Notre-Dame, the noble survivor of the centuries. Here is Notre-Dame—truly a cathedral for the ages.

Paris is unquestionably a city for lovers, and it has been a privilege and a delight to discover so many of its wonders by his side.

Do not copy me,” [Antoine] Bourdelle repeatedly told his students. “Sing your own song.

Returning to Paris the day after the empire’s fall, Hugo was greeted by a huge crowd at the Gare du Nord. Never one to shy from an audience, he pushed his way through the mob and into a café, where he spoke from a balcony: “Citizens,” he told them, “I have come to do my duty.” He had come, he added, “to defend Paris, to protect Paris”—a sacred trust, given Paris’s position as the “center of humanity.”6 After that, he climbed aboard an open carriage, from where he spoke again to the fervent crowd before making his way to the house of a friend, near Place Pigalle. There the young Montmartre mayor, Georges Clemenceau, warmly welcomed him.

He was witness to a Paris in ruins, with ashes and destruction everywhere. But despite the terrible damage and the enormous amount of suffering, the shattered city was already showing surprising signs of life. The day after the Commune had been annihilated, Goncourt sanguinely wrote: “This evening one can hear the movement of Parisian life starting up again, and its murmur like a distant tide.” Two days later, he added: “Across the paving-stones which are being replaced, the people of Paris, dressed in their travelling-clothes, are swarming in to take possession of their city once more.” Zola, writing to Cézanne soon after his return, put it more succinctly: “Paris is coming to life again.” Sarah Bernhardt agreed. One morning soon after her own return, she received a notice of rehearsal from the Odéon theater. “I shook out my hair,” she wrote, “stamped my feet, and sniffed the air like a young horse snorting.” She had realized, with typical exuberance, that “life was commencing again.” But perhaps Edouard Manet put it best of all. Writing to Berthe Morisot on June 10, he told her, “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live anywhere else.

This psychology crap? I can guess where you're going with this tantrum, and in the interest of saving time — which seems to be an imperative for you — I would say that what is bullshit to you is a field of disciple that I've got a PhD is and will spend the rest of my life further researching, participating in, and advocating for. So if you're looking to persuade me that there isn't value in what I do, you're pushing water uphill.

What about justice,” he asked, “and charity, and resignation, and courage, and everything which makes the human soul to live!” Religion, he continued, “is a spirit, a movement of the heart. You make of it a power, a society, an exterior force, something which struggles with other powers and other societies. To love God and one’s fellow man, is it necessary to have so much materiality?”42

For two months he had tried to keep up his writing as cannon boomed night and day and as shells hissed over his head, but at last—warned that he was about to be seized and possibly shot by the Communards—he fled Paris. At the time, it seemed the end of the world. But he quickly forgot this once the Commune was over. Writing in July to his boyhood friend, Paul Cézanne, he told him that now that he was back in his home in Paris, it all seemed as if it had been a bad dream. When he saw that “my house is the same, my garden has not budged, not a piece of furniture, not a plant has suffered,” he concluded that it almost seemed as if it all had been a “nasty farce invented to frighten children.”3

In medieval times, one-third of Europe’s population was decimated by the bubonic plague. Within a few centuries of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas had been wiped out by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other germs brought in by European invaders and colonists. More people died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic than were killed in the trenches of World War I. Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age.

Malaria, despite mountains of money invested in vaccines and public-health measures to counter it, still afflicts 214 million people in ninety-seven countries

An estimated 10 to 30 percent of people in North America and Europe are infected with the worm’s larvae, and as much as 40 percent of the populations of some poor countries.

And in 2014, anti-immigration websites and even some U.S. congressional representatives warned that the stream of Latin American refugees flooding the nation’s southern border might infect citizens with Ebola—and this despite the fact that not a single case of the disease had occurred south of Texas.

Babies delivered by C-section into the sterile hands of a surgeon have fewer encounters with their mothers’ microbiomes in the critical early period when gut populations are being established. And newborns fed formula miss out on hundreds of microbial strains in their mothers’ breast milk.

After the mother’s water breaks, microbes lining her vaginal canal jump aboard the infant with each contraction. From that moment forward, each of us becomes a magnet for microbes.

The leaves they choose always are covered in indigestible hairs, and the animals never chew them, as they would food, but rather swallow the leaves whole—sometimes as many as a hundred in one bout. All that roughage, Huffman believes, dramatically accelerates the movement of food through the GI tract, purging them of at least two species of parasitic worms.

Clay is especially valuable to rats, she reported, as those animals can’t vomit. When poisoned with lithium chloride by experimenters, they immediately eat clay if given the chance and are presumed to do the same when their gastric upset is caused by pathogens. People have been consuming clay since at least as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.

Rather, it appears that disgust sensitivity is related to a conservatism across a wide variety of cultures, geographic regions, and political systems.

The dazzling white Sacré-Coeur, which went up in the Commune’s aftermath, was erected in expiation for the sins of France, but its conservative Catholic promoters had little sympathy with the Communards. Not coincidentally, the basilica completely hides the ground where the cannons were parked and the uprising first broke out.

Goncourt observed in a rare compliment, although he felt compelled to add that the dinner included “some grouse whose scented flesh Daudet compared to an old courtesan’s flesh marinaded in a bidet.”14

Monet in turn introduced Sisley, Bazille, and Renoir to the group, which met evenings at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, at the edge of Montmartre.