CHRISTINE KENNEALLY

Nicholas Blechman and Greg Mollica, who created the cover for "The First Word," get their due in "Penguin 75." A wonderful book celebrating Penguin's 3/4 century, it features 75 of the best and worst covers from the past decade with commentary from the designers, authors, artists, editors and agents. Here, too, a great blog post on the book that excerpts the commentary on The First Word.

 

Since 2004, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling thinking about tsunamis and earthquakes. The monster wave that hit Indonesia that year was caused by a earthquake so violent it shifted the axis of the earth a few centimeters. Now I can’t get this out of my mind: The planet literally shook.

Everyone has one--whether its global warming, phthalates, flu, or junk food--it's that thought that makes them quake. Still, despite the fear, most people do their best to live sustainably, heal naturally, and raise their children right.

But how often is it that one's efforts feel good enough? For the most part, the solutions are inadequate or unachievable or overwhelmingly, confusingly both. If you turn on the air conditioner because you are too warm, you cause global warming. If you vaccinate your children to protect them, you fear the vaccine may hurt them, and yet if you get cancer, it’s your fault for being so angry and fearful all the time. What if you don’t actually want to walk to the local abattoir and slaughter your own pig so you can eat your sausages morally? What does that even mean?

You could consider optimism, for a change. I thought about it a lot when I reviewed Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist."

One of the first, and certainly the coolest, proto-web magazine FEED is back up.

Is a "wine-dark sea" incredibly poetic or just odd? Did the ancients see in black and white? New Scientist.

"Rawa-dawa!" And other words. In this week's cover story at New Scientist.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to a child’s brain if you left them in front of the TV all day? What about kids in bright, happy daycare-like situations where there’s no personal attention. What kind of future do they have? How about children who have all the money in the world but no parental attention? Are they really worse off than poor children with no material advantages? Consider the flip side: How do children from career-criminal families differ from other children?

I just read Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered by Maia Szalavitz, a science journalist, and Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist, a great book in which these questions are explored. Szalavitz and Perry track the neuroscience of qualities like resilience and empathy—and the lack of them—through a series of case studies, mostly of children who have been treated by Perry. I met Szalavitz once. She’s a rock-solid science journalist who’s walked where many reporters fear to tread, writing vividly about the more disturbing side of life in The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog and Help at Any Cost. “Born to Love” is in the same vein--many of the stories, which are compulsively readable, have a straight-out-of-the-twilight-zone quality.

She was clever, learned, and unflinching when it came to plunging a paper knife into a man's back or poisoning an old lady with strychnine... Slate.

Australia's Black Saturday--a fire so devastating that even the science of wildfire is being reexamined, at The New Yorker. Plus an online Q&A and some citizen-video.

Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, believes that it's just as natural to be nice as it is be mean. Man may be wolf to man, as the old saying has it, but de Waal points out with casual eloquence in The Age of Empathy that wolves are often... Slate.

You were 37, you'd had two harrowing bouts with breast cancer, and you'd reached critical levels of ennui in your magazine editor's job (the constant promotional parties, the fancy shoes, and the endless supply of giveaway moisturizers). Then, you were fired and you took a major left turn. You went to India for a year to learn Hindi. doubleX.