About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa—still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate—a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.
— Charles Kenny in “ Think Again: Africa’s Crisis ” (Via: Tyler Cowen )
I’d known the boy well—he had been a student at the school where I taught English—but I hadn’t loved him. In fact, I had never loved anyone yet, because I was years away from having a child of my own, and until you’ve done that you’re just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.
— Caitlin Flanagan, referring to the John Edward’s deceased teenage son, in “ Sex and the Married Man ”
If you’re American or European it’s hard to realize this, but being able to digest milk as an adult is one weird genetic adaptation.It’s not normal. Somewhat less than 40% of people in the world retain the ability to digest lactose after childhood. The numbers are often given as close to 0% of Native Americans, 5% of Asians, 25% of African and Caribbean peoples, 50% of Mediterranean peoples and 90% of northern Europeans. Sweden has one of the world’s highest percentages of lactase tolerant people.
Being able to digest milk is so strange that scientists say we shouldn’t really call lactose intolerance a disease, because that presumes it’s abnormal. Instead, they call it lactase persistence, indicating what’s really weird is the ability to continue to drink milk.
— “ Sixty percent of adults can’t digest milk ”, Elizabeth Weise in USA Today
[E]very man needs a daughter. All of my male friends who had children were changed for the better by having at least one daughter. It is not a wife who socializes a husband, it is a daughter.
— Anonymous commenter on Marginal Revolution
The story of the Jews centers around—one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better or worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha : Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.
— Novelist Michael Chabon (Via: Alan Jacobs )
Nonhuman primates scarcely respond to human music, and instead prefer silence . . . . Oddly, their only response to several samples of human music was a calming response to the heavy-metal band Metallica.
— “ Monkeys get a groove on, but only to monkey music ”, PhysOrg.com
