Martha Graham debuted her masterpiece, Appalachian Spring, at the Library of Congress in 1944, at the height of the Second World War. By then, Graham was nearly two decades into her career as a choreographer and was emerging as the first global celebrity of modern dance. Just a few years earlier, she was invited by Joseph Goebbels to perform at the Berlin Olympics. It was 1936, and
Andrew Chiu, a prodemocracy district councilor in Hong Kong, was attempting to stop a knife-wielding assailant from attacking protesters in November 2019 when the attacker broke free and lunged at him. The man pulled Chiu close in a belligerent embrace, sank his teeth into Chiu’s left ear, then snapped his head back and, as Chiu reached up to find blood spilling from his head, spat a sinuous chunk of flesh onto the brick sidewalk.
An attempt to reattach Chiu’s ear
Every now and then my phone sees fit to create a ‘memory’ from one of my stored photos and notifies me of it. Mostly I just ignore them, but the one I received a couple of weeks ago stopped me in my tracks and made me go misty-eyed.
Was it a snap from a particularly memorable holiday? A beautiful sunset? Or a happy family Christmas? None of the above. It was a photo of me standing in a drab ladies
Over the last few years, workers in the United States have propelled a resurgent wave of union organizing. With the approval of organized labor at its highest among young people, it’s no surprise that colleges and universities have been a linchpin of the movement. Across the country—from resident advisers at Columbia University to dining workers at William & Mary to
The classical view of how the human brain controls voluntary movement might not tell the whole story.
That map of the primary motor cortex — the motor homunculus — shows how this brain region is divided into sections assigned to each body part that can be controlled voluntarily (SN: 6/16/15). It puts your toes next to your ankle, and your neck next to your thumb. The space each part takes up on the cortex is also proportional to
In December 2021, Francis Collins, the outgoing head of the $45 billion federal National Institutes of Health declared himself utterly flummoxed. “I never imagined,” the walrus-whiskered Collins told PBS, “a year ago…that we would still have 60 million people” resisting vaccines.
