In early September, the European Scientific Working group on Influenza convened on Malta to hold its fourth conference. Researchers delivered a variety of technical reports on the state of influenza research and the prospects for vaccines. As was the case with the first three conferences, the world ...

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Fifty years ago, Norton Juster changed children’s literature when a bored Milo entered the Lands Beyond in The Phantom Tollbooth. In his essay for The New Yorker, Broken Kingdom , Adam Gopnik recalls his own adventure in the strange land of numbers and words, and interviews Juster to reveal t...

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I’ve been asked in comments to my previous post about construction costs what can be done to contain them, and tempting as it is to just repeat listing good cases, in the wrong context it can do more harm than good. Whenever we are faced with a success story, it’s tempting to confuse a...

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early-onse t-of-night : OUR ABORTION WAS DIFFERENT: WHEN THE ANTI-CHOICE CHOOSE Rick Santorum, former Pennsylvania senator and likely presidential candidate, wants all abortions outlawed. He has even said that abortion providers should be “criminally charged.” Clearly, his compassion fo...

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The News Just a gentle reminder to US mystery readers that Jo Nesbo’s latest Harry Hole novel, The Leopard will be released next week, Dec 13th. I’ve already read it and it’s good. The Redeemer still holds the top spot for me though and I still don’t see a publication ...

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Portugal decriminalized drugs a decade ago. What have we learned? : Portual’s progressive attitude towards drugs.  In a nutshell, it goes like this:  Accept, don’t deny. Opinion: They don’t treat drugs as tabooically as the other countries. ......

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I will never forget the moment in my athletic career where it became painfully obvious that I was not going to be as good as Michael Jordan.  I was at the Sixers basketball camp in up-state Pennsylvania and the team’s shooting instructor was giving a talk.  He started by explaining a dunk he wit...

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Although it was an apparently accidental attack on Pakistani soldiers that provoked an international incident, the other day a NATO airstrike killed six children in Afghanistan. The political writer Glenn Greenwald had this to say about the killings : �"- I read about the death of these c...

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[Link] “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and Young-Adult Fantasy Books : The New Yorker : Actually this New Yorker piece on the conventions and appeal of the fantasy genre is mostly about LotR and Eragon , not Twilight , but with Breaking Dawn in the theaters I guess Eustace Till...

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