Vol. 76 Nbr. 2, March 2007

Index

• Reality revisited.
• Pseudo-conservatism on trial.
• The scholar at 75.
• On creative writing programs.
• Living large on oil.
• A new theory of the universe: biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation.
• When 2 + 2 = 5: can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?
• The mind at work and play: exploring the wonder of the world--and what comes next.
• What's on the Wall.
• Another Cause for Wonder.
• Still and Yet.
• Typing Lesson: A Little Fable.
• Toward the End.
• The judge's jokes: shards of memory, for better or worse, from my father the after--banquet speaker.
• The apologist: the celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke appeared at the funeral of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him?
• The cook's son: the death of a young man, long ago in Africa, continues to raise questions with no answers.
• One day in the life of Melvin Jules Bukiet: a Manhattan writer runs afoul of the penal system and lives to tell the tale.
• North of ordinary.
• Plum Creek.
• What happened to the social agenda? Leading modernists once wanted to improve the lives of everyday people; star architects today hope to astonish and amuse their elite clients.
• Globalization and its discontents: the directors of Babel and Cache tell complex stories of families caught in ever-expanding worlds.
• Happy talk: what did we know about joy, and when did we know it?
• The impulse to exclude: Ralph Ellison wrote one great novel and then lived a life that is hard to admire.
• Hearsay: from the divinely inspired to the pathological, a history of auditory hallucination.
• An epic in flux: Gilgamesh, the world's first great literaly work, is still being pieced together.
• Design problem: does the internal physiology of animals imply a harmony of structure and function?
• War weary: if Iraq is not another Vietnam, why do I find myself rereading Dispatches?
• Defeat.
• The scientist's fresh eye.