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The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistan's thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn't allowed to leave her home. Fearing that she'd be kidnapped or raped by warlords, her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio, became her only form of education.
In Afghan culture, poetry is revered, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet — a landay — an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traditionally, landays are sung aloud, often to the beat of a hand drum, which, along with other kinds of music, was banned by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, and in some places, still is.
A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound "ma" or "na." Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love. Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
From the Aryan caravans that likely brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago to ongoing U.S. drone strikes, the subjects of landays are remixed like hip-hop, with old words swapped for newer, more relevant ones. A woman's sleeve in a centuries-old landay becomes her bra strap today. A colonial British officer becomes a contemporary American soldier. A book becomes a gun. Each biting word change has much to teach about the social satire that ripples under the surface of a woman's life. With the drawdown of American forces in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk when the Americans pull out. Although some landays reflect fury at the presence of the U.S. military, many women fear that in the absence of America's involvement they will return to lives of isolation and oppression, just as under the Taliban.
Landays began among nomads and farmers. They were shared around a fire, sung after a day in the fields or at a wedding. More than three decades of war has diluted a culture, as well as displaced millions of people who can't return safely to their villages. Conflict has also contributed to globalization. Now people share landays virtually via the internet, Facebook, text messages, and the radio. It's not only the subject matter that makes them risqué. Landays are mostly sung, and singing is linked to licentiousness in the Afghan consciousness. Women singers are viewed as prostitutes. Women get around this by singing in secret — in front of only close family or, say, a harmless-looking foreign woman. Usually in a village or a family one woman is more skilled at singing landays than others, yet men have no idea who she is. Much of an Afghan woman's life involves a cloak-and-dagger dance around honor — a gap between who she seems to be and who she is.
These days, for women, poetry programs on the radio are one of the few permissible forms of access to the outside world. Such was the case for Rahila Muska, who learned about a women's literary group called Mirman Baheer via the radio. The group meets in the capital of Kabul every Saturday afternoon; it also runs a phone hotline for girls from the provinces, like Muska, to call in with their own work or to talk to fellow poets. Muska, which means smile in Pashto, phoned in so frequently and showed such promise that she became the darling of the literary circle. She alluded to family problems that she refused to discuss.
One day in the spring of 2010, Muska phoned her fellow poets from a hospital bed in the southeastern city of Kandahar to say that she'd set herself on fire. She'd burned herself in protest. Her brothers had beaten her badly after discovering her writing poems. Poetry — especially love poetry — is forbidden to many of Afghanistan's women: it implies dishonor and free will. Both are unsavory for women in traditional Afghan culture. Soon after, Muska died.
After learning about Muska, I traveled to Afghanistan with the photographer Seamus Murphy on assignment with the New York Times Magazine to piece together what I could of her brief life story. Finding Muska's family seemed an impossible task — one dead teenage poet writing under the safety of a pseudonym in a war zone — but eventually, with the aid of a highly-effective Pashtun organization called wadan, the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan, we were able to locate her village and find her parents. Her real name, it turned out, was Zarmina, and her story was about more than poetry.
This was a love story gone awry. Engaged at an early age to her cousin, she'd been forbidden from marrying him, because after the recent death of his father, he couldn't afford the volver, the bride price. Her love was doomed and her future uncertain; death became the one control she could assert over her life.
Although she didn't write this poem, Rahila Muska often recited landays over the phone to the women of Mirman Baheer. This is common: of the tens of thousands of landays in circulation, the handful a woman remembers relate to her life. Landays survive because they belong to no one. Unlike her notebooks, the little poem couldn't be ripped up and destroyed by Muska's father.
On that trip in the winter of 2012, I also began to collect landays. One afternoon in Helmand, our search for the dead poet led us to an agricultural seminar where women were learning to grow vegetables rather than the more lucrative cash crop of poppy. When I asked if anyone knew a landay, one woman named Gulmakai leapt to her feet and uttered the following poem.
The room of maybe sixty women gasped and burst into laughter, but I didn't understand the Pashto, and because the poem was about sex, neither did my unmarried translator, Asma Safi, who was earnest and twenty-five. Sex, marriage, love — all can be the same thing, so a literal rendering of this poem goes something like this: Love or Sex or Marriage, Man, Old / Love or Sex or Marriage, Cornstalk, Black Fungal Blight. In other words, mystifying. It wasn't until later when Asma's uncle drew us a picture of a healthy, young cornstalk next to a decaying, blighted one that we — or rather, I — understood what the landay meant. I tried to contact Gulmakai again — she had given me her brother's phone number — but she didn't have his permission to speak.
Nine months later Seamus Murphy and I returned to Afghanistan with the sole aim of collecting these poems. For years we have wanted to collaborate on a collection of words and images that capture the humanity and humor of Afghan life. I wanted to gather poems from women before the U.S. pulled out and their voices were lost. Like many long-suffering people, Afghans have learned to use laughter as a survival skill. This is especially true for Afghan women. However, finding, collecting, recording, and translating these little poems word by word posed an extraordinary challenge. Gathering them led Seamus and me through the pages of out-of-print collections, and in secret into refugee camps, private homes, a horse farm, and several weddings. Since landays belong to the hidden world of Afghan women, many won't share them in front of one another out of fear they'd later be gossiped about. Some requested that their names be changed or that I not record how I came by the landays that they whispered to me. One husband hurried up to me after I'd had tea with his wife and asked the subject of the landay that she'd given me. "Separation," I told him. The poem was about sex.
To find these poems, we started in refugee camps as the poet and intellectual Sayd Bahodine Majrouh did when he collected landays during the civil war of the 1980s*. Since landays belong to a rural tradition, and the rural Pashtun heartland is a war zone, traveling to remote villages would endanger women as well as us. In some cases, women asked that I come to their houses dressed in a burqa so as not to be seen by spies or nosy neighbors. Slogging away in the same fashion that we have for the past ten years as journalists, Seamus and I joked that this was investigative poetry.
In one refugee camp, I was sneaked into a wedding party made up solely of women. As is the custom, in order to demonstrate her extreme modesty — read virginity — the bride sat entirely covered with a heavy white veil and crouched against a wall while guests pressed money into her fist to pay to see her face. Someone brought out a drum and the women began to sing poems about nato bombing raids. I recorded their singing on my iPhone, which alarmed them so intensely that on my next visit they took my phone from me and shoved it in a corner under a stack of pillows. Refugee camps in the capital of Kabul were followed by private homes, schools, and government offices in and around the eastern city of Jalalabad, a centuries-old center of poetry and landays. Where I couldn't travel to meet the women of remote villages, I asked local leaders, teachers, and others to collect landays and bring them to me. These proved to be some of the most interesting, since many such places were under siege by predator drones, and I discovered that drones — called bipilot, without pilot, or remoti tayara, remote control flights — had entered the language of landays.
*In 1988, Majrouh was assassinated by religious fanatics who would later become the Taliban. In 1994 one of his French colleagues, André Velter, published these landays in French under the title: Le Suicide and le chant. In 2003 this collection was translated into English by Marjolijn de Jager and published as Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry (Other Press, 2010). Curiously enough, "suicide" is absent, and yet today, as thirty years ago, death and song are still the two forms of rebellion and self-determination readily available to Pashtun women like Rahila Muska.
Much has been made recently of so-called "Taliban poetry": poems that express rage at the Americans or loyalty to the militants' cause. Yet these sentiments have little to do with love for the Taliban. Instead, they reflect a fed-upness with foreign occupation and a deepening terror of living under the threat of drone strikes. What I found, especially among women who'd had to flee bombing raids, or lost family members, whether Taliban fighters or farmers, is that they were singing about their hatred of Americans and support the Taliban merely in reaction to all they'd endured in our twelve-year war. These scraps of anthems were more about Afghan identity than religion, although the two are often intertwined. I wanted to explore the impact that the last decade of war has had on Afghan culture and to share the sex and earthiness and outrage at military occupation, especially bombing, that these pressurized poems barely contain. Yet here's the paradox: without the U.S. presence, the plight of women in Afghanistan will be even more dismal.
Translating these poems was an intricate process. I collected most of them in person with two native Pashto speakers, both of whom were, of necessity, young women. Over gallons of green tea at the cozy house that wadan occupies in Kabul, we transcribed the poems in Pashto, which has the same characters and sounds as Arabic, so I could sound out words although I had no clue of their meaning. On the fly, we'd rough out an English version in the car or during lunch to gauge whether the landay merited the time it would take to render properly in English. Then, along with a translator, I translated the selected poems word by word into English. Working from that frequently nonsensical literal version, I sat with a handful of native Pashto speakers — academics, writers, journalists, and ordinary women — and went over each poem to make certain the translations made sense. My versions rhyme more often than the originals do, because the English folk tradition of rhyme proved the most effective way of carrying the lilt of the Pashto over into English. The most useful note on translation came from Mustafa Salik, one of Afghanistan's leading novelists: "Don't worry so much about being faithful to the Pashto. Get them right in English so that people can enjoy them."
Of the many remarkable and generous individuals who made this project possible, the first was the translator Asma Safi, who, despite the risk and scandal of traveling with foreigners as a Pashtun woman, accompanied Seamus and me to Helmand to find Rahila Muska's family in early 2012. To ensure her safety and honor, her armed uncle, Safiullah, traveled with us. Asma Safi was planning our next trip into the field when she died of a heart condition in a taxi on the way to the Kabul hospital during the fall of 2012. This collection is dedicated to her.
This landay is attributed to an Afghan folk hero, Malalai, a Pashtun poet and woman warrior who fought alongside the commander Ayub Khan to defeat the British at the Battle of Maiwand on July 27, 1880. Its themes: war — jang; a woman's pride in her lover's courage and in his willingness to sacrifice himself for homeland — watan; love — meena; separation — biltoon; grief — gham, are the five most common currents that run through these poems. In addition, this landay mentions a tattoo — khal — which women used to receive at birth to ward off the evil eye. These days, baby girls are much less likely to be tattooed, as the practice is considered superstitious and un-Islamic. The faces of older Pashtun women, however, are dotted with these rough-hewn circles, moons, and flowers: living reminders of another time.
Many landays use sex and war to tease men about their cowardice in bed and in battle. This is one of the ways in which Pashtun women undermine the social code through these folk poems: simultaneously seducing men and mocking their weakness at the very skills with which they're supposed to display the greatest strength. In the second landay here, the woman speaker is shaming her cowardly lover, saying that she'd rather be blown up than have him lie that she's afraid to kiss him. Pashtun women are proud to be afraid of very little.
This a very old landay that has been remixed: the word "sleeve" here has been replaced by "bra strap" in Pashto. Old and new, both speak to the salty nature that these poems have possessed for centuries. But what's ironic now is that the southeastern city of Kandahar, the home of Afghanistan's most famed pomegranates, is also the birthplace of the Taliban. Despite the rigidity on the surface, women's rebellion simmers underneath. Landays are its foremost form of expression. Since they are collective and anonymous, a woman can't be held responsible for repeating them.
In the second couplet, the man responds by saying that he can't afford to touch the woman's bra, since that would require that he perform ablutions afterward to purify himself. Who, he asks, will pay the fee for him to use the bathroom? It's a clever ripost to a bold woman's dare.
One leading theory of landays' origin traces back to the Bronze-Age arrival of Indo-Aryan caravans to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India around 1700 bce. These poems could have evolved out of communication through call and response back and forth over a long caravan train. Many of the poems refer back to this nomadic way of life, as well as to the moon, flowers, nature. As ancient songs, they are thought to be related to the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures at least five thousand years old and comprised of couplets called slokas, not unlike landays, except that they are sixteen rather than twenty-two syllables long.
Traditionally in landays and in Pashtun society the riverbank, or godar, where women gather water is the place of romance. Men are forbidden from going to the godar, but they frequently sneak looks at their crushes coming and going from the riverbank. Many rural Pashtun women believe that the internet's sole purpose is for matchmaking. The second landay here refers to another burgeoning technology: an estimated seventeen million Afghans — out of twenty-five million total — have mobile phones. Torpekai Shinwari, a woman from the district of Rodar, gathered these poems from the girls of her village.
The nomadic life of Pashtun herdsmen, called Kuchis, continues today. Kuchis still migrate between Afghanistan and Pakistan with their livestock. Depending on the time of year, their white and black goat-felt tents dot the roadside between Kabul and Peshawar.
Sanga, a sixteen-year-old girl who'd gotten engaged to her cousin about a month before I met her in the eastern city of Jalalabad, told me this landay. Her cousin approached her on the walk to school and recited a landay to declare his love: "My mother loves me and God loves my mother / so God will reward you with being my mother's daughter (my wife)." Then he sent her the landay on the facing page by text message, to which she responded via landay, saying that he'd better hurry up and send his family to ask for her hand in marriage since others were already coming to her home. The young couple corresponds by landays.
Sanga and her older sister Salma asked me to wear a burqa when I came for tea so that neighbors wouldn't gossip, which could lead to scandal for their family or, worse, reprisal at the hands of the Taliban for hosting a foreign spy. Salma is a radio host and teaches literature at the local university. She was worried about the fate of professional women after the U.S. left. "What will happen to us?" she asked.
For a fee, such as a goat, Muslim holy men used to write spells, love charms, and hexes. With the rise of stricter forms of Islam over the past several decades, this practice, like facial tattoos, has fallen out of favor.
The call and response nature of landays has morphed into teasing and sparring love poems between men and women; a kind of stichomythia that rivals that of ancient Greece. Although it's possible that a woman might sing one part and a man another, they're not really antiphonal. It's more likely that one singer will recite the entire series to the beat of a drum. Then, in friendly competition around a fire in the evening — or on a couch in a sitting room in Kabul over after-dinner tea — a spirited rivalry will spring up between singers who try to outdo one another with poems.
Among Afghans, farting is far more embarrassing and shameful than it is in the West. There's a folktale about a man who farts by mistake in front of his family and out of shame leaves home for twenty years. When he returns, he stands outside the door and hears his wife exhorting his children never to be farters like their father. He leaves home for another twenty years. Beneath the raunch and humor, the idea here is that a woman can be as vulgar a teaser as a man.
The second landay was posted by Eimal Dorani on his Pashto Landay Facebook page, which now has more than twenty thousand "likes." Dorani, like many young Pashtuns, lives outside of Afghanistan. The members meet online to share poems as a means to speak Pashto and to trade jokes and landays about missing home — Kabul-jan, dear Kabul — and being separated from it. One of the most often repeated words in landays is musafir — traveler — which essentially describes anyone far from home, including Afghans who leave the country for education, to make a living, or to escape war. On Facebook the landays are frequently wistful both for the country itself and for a time before war when men and women were free to interact openly. Along with the landays that readers send, Dorani posts pictures. He has devised a method to swap landays with Pashtun strangers, most of whom are fellow exiles living outside of the country. One posts a landay and then, in the comments, others respond with their own. Within a matter of hours, landays morph and are remixed by different readers: a process that used to take decades, even centuries. This has become a virtual competition and trading site. These are landays of love, separation, and homeland. Here's the link: facebook.com/pashtolanday.
These come from a mother, Marhabo, and her teenage daughter, Sabergul, in Khushal Khan refugee camp in a Kabul suburb of the same name. Khushal Khan Khattak was a famous seventeenth-century warrior and poet who mobilized Afghan resistance to the Mughals. To collect landays in the camp, I gathered all the women and asked who knew landays. Of course everyone knew them, although some women pretended not to since I wasn't Pashtun and it's embarrassing and dishonorable to sing, even in front of other women. Realizing that this method of collection wasn't going to work, I announced that any woman who didn't know a landay or wouldn't share one had to leave the room. No one wanted to go. Maybe it was the bag of candy sitting beside me, or just the curiosity and pride of the women. Eventually, after about a dozen women had attempted to offer poems, one mother and daughter took the lead in reciting. Once everyone else left, Sabergul recited the first poem here to the uproarious laughter of her mother. The poem makes reference to a particular kind of men's Bollywood hairdo — a bob — that had been the fashion a couple of years earlier. Once she grew comfortable enough to start to joke, Marhabo, mother of eleven children, made up the second landay on the spot to tease the photographer, Seamus Murphy. Pashtun women aren't shy about teasing men — as long as they're not going to get caught doing it.
For Pashtun women, romantic love is verboten. Even at her wedding a good Pashtun girl scowls to show she has no interest in the man she's about to marry. If she's discovered to be in love, she can be killed or wind up killing herself, like Zarmina, the dead poet from Helmand. The second landay here comes from an ancient folktale, "Talib-jan and Gulbashra," which belongs to a largely forgotten oral collection called the Milli Hindara, a fantastic version of which has been recently translated by David Pate. (It is as yet unpublished.) A Talib simply means a religious student. In this story, a Talib falls in love with a beautiful woman who distracts him from his studies. Almost every woman I interviewed knew this landay, but not where it came from. Since the rise of the Taliban regime and their religious edicts against women, this poem is associated with Taliban hypocrisy: they pose as pious while raping women and boys.
These landays reflect how the poems have shifted over time. The first is oldest. It used to go: "My lover is fair as a British soldier," from the nineteenth-century British occupation in Afghanistan. In some places, the word Angrez, or English, is still shorthand for any foreigner. Slowly the word American is taking its place. The second is popular on the radio and Facebook now. All soldiers, be they Spanish, British, Italian, are called American. In an earlier version of the final poem, the word "American" was "liar."
Ashaba, an elderly woman in Samar Khel Tagaw, a refugee camp about ten miles east of Jalalabad, repeated this landay to me. Her husband lay dying in the next room and she was terrified of what would happen to her after his death. Without him she feared she would lose her place in the world. Like most Afghan women, she had no idea of her age. When I asked, she replied, "I'm fifty." Her daughter replied, "Mom! I'm fifty. You're at least seventy." The tiny mud room of maybe twenty women huddled cross-legged together on the floor cackled gleefully. Afterward, we went to meet Ashaba's husband: a ghost of a man tucked into a wooden bed in an empty room.
Grief, or gham, brings with it experience and wisdom. A bride, her hand woven with henna designs, shared this landay with me as we waited for her husband's family to fetch her on her wedding night. We sat in a small room with all of her sisters on the second floor of her father's home and listened for the husband's family to come up the stairs. Although it was a happy occasion, the poem's ambivalence speaks to her anxiety at leaving her childhood home. In her husband's house, she will serve her mother-in-law.
This is a lament of an unmarried girl who is growing older and fearful of becoming unchosen, unmarried, and therefore anathema and valueless in Pashtun society.
This second landay also came from the Samar Khel Tagaw refugee camp. A woman named Ghotai sang it tunelessly through clenched teeth. She had come to the camp that day to search for a place to live. She and her husband had just been kicked out of their home by her husband's brother, she said, and she was enraged at her husband for not standing up to his brother. Because her husband was too weak to protect her, she wished him dead. Like candy or sweets, popcorn is a treat in Afghanistan, much as it is in America.
Policharki is an infamous prison built by the Russians in Kabul. More recently, it has housed insurgents, American military contractors (accused of running a private prison for profit), and a motley array of thieves and murderers. Basbibi, who sang this poem and the two that follow, told me, "I am the mother of landays." She lives in Char-i-Kambar, a Kabul refugee camp where more than two dozen people froze to death in 2012. One was her husband.
In the camp, there was also an ongoing war over water: who had the right to use the one pump. Basbibi's brother was sent to Policharki Prison for killing a fellow refugee over water. The women who gathered in secret to listen to Basbibi sing for me were afraid that I would try to record the landays on my iPhone, so they covered the phone with pillows. They felt recording would violate their honor, and possibly get them in trouble with men. The only "school" any had attended took place in the camp where the women learned to sew and how to push the buttons on a mobile phone.
Basbibi was missing their village in Sangin, a rural district of Helmand province, which they'd fled under heavy nato bombing.
In Pashtun society, the village mullah is all-powerful and his word can doom any villager. The metaphor in the second landay is that separation is also all-powerful and unjust.
After Osama bin Laden attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, President Clinton retaliated by launching cruise missiles on Tora Bora and Khost. The first poem here grew popular at the time.
Remoti, which means remote control, applies to both remote control bombs and to unmanned aircraft, or drones. The second landay, scrawled on a metal fragment, was posted on Facebook with a comment saying that this was a piece of an mrap, a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle used by the U.S. military, a modern-day tank. According to the Facebook post, the Afghan Taliban left this landay on the torn-off door of an mrap that they'd blown up in Tangi Valley in 2009 for U.S. forces to find.
The first landay could be seen as an example of "Taliban poetry," the anti-American verse that's widely popular in Afghanistan. However, as noted in the introduction, not all poems that oppose the Americans belong to the Taliban. The rage against the international forces, especially in the southeast of the country, which has borne much of the brunt of war, is such that anti-American landays are fairly commonplace. Drone attacks make it worse. Because of their omnipresence in the skies above the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, drones have now entered into landays. Psychologically, their noisy presence and seemingly indiscriminate missles have taken a heavy toll on those who live beneath their flight path, waiting for the drones to strike. Even for those who hate the Taliban, the fear of drones has helped to drive support for the militants, as they're seen as the only ones brave enough to fight the occupation of land and now sky.
The second landay was sung by Chadana, the mother of a Taliban fighter who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Zormat, in the southeastern province of Paktia, in 2011. Chadana had three sons: two became Taliban fighters and the third a policeman. She sang this landay about Nabi at a wedding where it was recorded on a cell phone and sent to her cousin, a businesswoman named Sharifa Ahmadzai, who repeated it to me in her home in Jalalabad.
Fighting jihad is a point of pride — as is, for men as well as women, oiling one's hair. Thus this landay pokes fun at the arrogance and "borrowed glory" demonstrated by the Taliban female relatives, asking why they are so arrogant, since it is the men who are fighting, not the women.
Haram Bibi, sixty, is the mother of a forty-six-year-old man named Allah Mohamad who, along with his son Shahidullah, had been taken prisoner during a raid on their home in the village of Dawlatzai, in the province of Chaprihar two years earlier. She came from the mountains to tell me his story and to see if I could be of service in helping the family contact a lawyer. For six months the family had no word of where the men were. They assumed it was Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Haram Bibi began to sing landays during that time. Eventually they learned through the International Red Crescent Society that Allah Mohamad and his son were being held by U.S. forces at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Soon after, they spoke to him via video conference. The family believes that he's being held unjustly — that a jealous cousin set him up by telling the Americans rumors about him. They explain that they were in a land dispute with this cousin, and Allah Mohamad was the head of the village. Now that he's in prison, the rival has taken his place and claimed the plot of disputed land between the two houses. "Why don't the Americans ask what the relationship is between people in these kind of cases?" one family member asked when I met them. Whether or not their claim is accurate, this is a common problem, in which fellow family members or rivals accuse one another of links to the Taliban in the hope that the international forces might imprison their enemy.
This newer, remixed landay speaks of the rumored death of Mullah Omar, Emir of the Taliban — who is in fact most likely alive and well in Pakistan.
The first poem holds a double meaning, as the best landays do. Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan since 2001, is a hugely unpopular figure among Afghans. He's widely seen as corrupt, even among his fellow ethnic Pashtuns, who also believe that he has sold the country out to American interests while promoting only his own. Here dollars are both a brand of clothing and a form of corruption. "Dollar," like "Hillary Clinton," "Bush," and even "Titanic," is a popular clothing label that Kabul tailors sew into suits.
As for the second landay, much of the Afghan heroin trade travels through Iran. Addiction rates are skyrocketing. In 2010, at least eight percent of the Afghan population — double the global average — was addicted to opium or heroin. In many places where food is scarce and medicine doesn't exist, poppy is the cure-all.
In Gareshk, the rural hometown of Zarmina — the poet who'd set herself alight with heating oil — the hospital parking lot teemed with a parade of men, new mothers, and their swaddled babies on a warm February day in 2012. None of them looked like the teenage girl with whom I was hoping to meet. She, too, was a poet and she called herself Meena Muska, which means love smile. It looked like she'd stood me up, which was hardly surprising since at first she'd refused to see me. Muska was also a secret member of Mirman Baheer, the women's literary circle. Although she'd never met any of the others, she phoned in regularly to read her fledgling poems. On the phone she called herself "The New Zarmina," yet she'd never met the girl who'd recently died. Like Zarmina, she'd been pulled out of school by her father. Like Zarmina, poetry was her only link to ongoing education and the wider world. Like Zarmina, she seemed to be careening toward a family disaster which they were powerless to stop.
This alarmed the members of Mirman Baheer in Kabul, who feared that she too might kill herself. But as with so many young Afghan girls, it was too hard to tell, over a patchy phone line, whether she was simply prone to drama or under serious threat. When I asked (with the help of my translator Asma Safi) if I could meet her, Meena refused. It was dishonorable, Meena claimed, for a Pashtun to meet an American given the havoc that the U.S. had wreaked on Afghanistan. It was also impossible for her to leave her home without her father's permission and even more improbable that I would be able to pay a visit. With Asma's help, the two devised a plan on the phone: Meena would tell her father that she was sick and had to go see the doctor at the hospital. I would meet her there.
Now, here we were in the midst of a market town thick with militants, sweating under burqas and waiting. "She didn't come," I lamented to Asma. "Wait," Asma said, "I think that's her." In front of our Toyota station wagon, a pair of rhinestone slippers poked out from beneath a mountain of jade cloth and it was clear that the woman was struggling with something. "She's making a phone call," Asma said. Sure enough, seconds later, Asma's phone rang and the voice instructed her to go around the side of the building to a withered garden of matted grass and petrified roses. Meena wasn't alone; she'd brought a chaperone, her meira, or second mother, her father's second wife. Meena explained that in the end she'd whispered to her mother where she was going, in case we kidnapped her. Her mother had sent along this junior wife to keep her daughter safe.
The four of us — Meena, her meira, Asma, and I — sat in a circle on the grass and pulled back our burqas enough so that we could see each others' faces without anyone wandering past being able to see us. With dark curly hair and pale green eyes, she was a beauty, probably about fifteen, she guessed. Like Zarmina, she'd been engaged since birth to a cousin, but he'd recently been killed by accident in a roadside bombing, and now she would have to marry either his much younger brother, or a much older one. Both repelled her, but this was the custom.
She pulled out a thin notebook with an apple tree on its cover. Here were her poems, which she didn't want me to write down. They were no good, she said, plus she didn't want them rendered in English, the enemy's language. Instead, aloud, she shared the popular and ancient landay above (p. 288) because she too was separated from her dead fiancé. As Asma scribbled the Pashto down in my notebook, Meena pulled two combs from her purse. On them perched rhinestone butterflies. She gave one to me and one to Asma. I wanted to give her a book of my poems, but such a thing would endanger her should her father or brothers discover it. So instead I took the scarf from my neck.
For more than a year, I haven't spoken to her. Her numbers (she had three mobile phones in her purse — clearly, a well-heeled girl) don't work anymore, and after Asma's heart failed on the way to the hospital in Kabul this past fall, it seemed all the harder. I suppose I could keep trying to reach her through Mirman Baheer, but no one could bridge our two worlds as Asma did. And I don't want to have to explain to Meena that Asma's dead. So our shared memory remains that one hour in the winter garden.
Eliza Griswold, a Guggenheim fellow, is the author of a collection of poems, Wideawake Field (2007) and a non-fiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault-line between Christianity and Islam (2010), which was awarded the Anthony J. Lukas Prize in non-fiction. Both books are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has had the pleasure to work with Seamus Murphy in Africa and Asia for more than a decade. She lives in New York City.
Seamus Murphy began photographing Afghanistan in 1994, leading to the book A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan (Saqi Books, 2008), a focus on the Afghan people through the turbulent years 1994–2007. His film of those experiences was nominated for a 2012 Emmy Award and received the 2012 Liberty in Media Prize. Murphy undertook three trips to Syria in 2012. His multimedia film Syrian Spring was nominated for a Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Reporting. Other accolades include seven World Press Photo Awards. He has made films for musician P.J. Harvey and a film on the London Olympics for the New Yorker. He is publishing a book of photographs on America in 2014. "Photography is part history, part magic," says Murphy.
In Kabul: The people of wadan, including Mohammad Nasib, Jean Kissell, Inayat Niazi, also Z.S., Nancy Hatch Dupree, Taous Sajed and his brother, Kamran, Sulieman Laeeq, Gulistan Shinwari, Eimal Dorani, Mustafa Salik, David Pate, Mahmood Marhoon, Sahera Sharif and the women of Mirman Baheer, Rasool Sekandari, Habib Sekandari. In Helmand: Asma Safi, Ghulam Mohammad Safi, Abdul Rahman Zahir and Abdul Bari Roman, and Sharifa Ahmadzai. In Nangarhar: Zia-ul-Haq and Ghulam Mohammad Safi, Ihsanullah Safi. In addition: The Poetry Foundation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the New York Times Magazine, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center.
Note: All photographs in this issue were taken by Seamus Murphy between November 1994 and December 2012. Most of the photographs do not correspond to the people described in the adjacent prose.


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The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues — code formatting, documentation, APIs — that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.
Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.
I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.
The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review — once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.
August 2000
- External links:
Web Application Development with PHP 4.0
- buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
PHP Pocket Reference
- buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
- details at O'Reilly & Associates
- Related reviews:
- books about computing
- books published by New Riders
- books published by O'Reilly & Associates


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Create a friendly and calming reception area with our healthcare facility lighting. Inviting illumination not only puts visitors at ease, but also draws their eyes to the reception area, making it easier to find.
a clinic
less clinical
round-the-clock care
Alleviating Anxiety
with light
Taking away fear
with light
Improve patient experience, with hospital lighting that aids healthy sleep and reduces anxiety
The pressure on reducing energy, maintenance costs and operating costs will continue to increase so that climate change and budget objectives can be met. Understanding the total costs of an lighting installation over it's whole life time is becoming increasingly important as budgets become tighter and long term planning is required.
CoreLine offers stylish, energy-saving, affordable, and easy-to-install lighting solutions – viable replacements for traditional lighting technologies.


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Our K-12 Learning and Education Curriculum features programs, teacher resources, and professional learning support to maximize student learning in classroom, distance or hybrid learning.
PEARSON, MYLAB, MYMATHLAB, MATHXL, MASTERING, STATCRUNCH, REVEL and the Pearson Logo are trademarks owned and/or registered by Pearson plc and/or its affiliates. All other third party marks associated with these products are the property of their respective owners. Copyright in the works referenced herein is owned by Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson Education has control over the editorial content in these instructional materials.


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Zhao Yan
From WikiLeaks
Leaking "state secrets" about tensions between Chinese leaders.
A Beijing-based journalist and researcher for the New York Times, Zhao Yan has been jailed since 17 September 2004 for allegedly leaking state secrets and committing fraud. He is accused of informing a New York Times colleague about rumored tensions between China's current president Hu Jintao and former leader Jiang Zemin. If convicted, Zhao Yan faces the death penalty.


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ClipFlair Forums. Create discussion topics and get answers
You can upload (attach to replies) image files licensed for educational or free use. Please mention the license under which the material is available and the needed attribution.
IF THE FILE EXTENSION (e.g. .TIFF) OF YOUR UPLOAD FILE ISN'T ACCEPTED, JUST ADD IT TO A .ZIP FILE AND UPLOAD THE ZIP INSTEAD
This website may be useful:
Banco de Imágenes (image bank) for educational purposes. They are all original images "donated" to the bank by their authors under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
And one more repository:
Image Use Policy
The Pics4Learning collection is intended to provide copyright friendly images for use by students and teachers in an educational setting. The original photographers of each image retain the copyright to these images and have graciously allowed their use in this collection. The images may not be sold as an image collection or partial image collection. Images in the Pics4Learning collection may be used by teachers and students in print, multimedia, and video productions. These could include, but are not limited to, school projects, contests, web pages, and fund raising activities for the express purpose of improving student educational opportunities.
NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 22,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.
You can download NGA images from here: https://images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html
"Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced" http://news.yale.edu/2011/05/10/digital-images-yale-s-vast-cultural-collections-now-available-free
An image from our meeting in Tallinn
Added zooming functionality to the ClipFlair Image component (still work in progress)
Not only can it zoom classic web images (JPEG, PNG), but it can also host DeepZoom tiled (.DZI) and sparse images / DeepZoom image collections (usually saved as .xml) files
one can make DeepZoom (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050%28VS.95%29.aspx) tiled images and DeepZoom image collections with various authoring tools, including DeepZoom Composer
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24819 (can read more about that tool at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409068%28loband%29.aspx)
however, the easiest way is to use http://zoom.it service ( http://zoom.it/pages/create/) to make a DeepZoom image wrapper (hosted at that site) for any big image on the web (giving the original image URL). e.g. http://zoom.it/wR4i is a ClipFlair Poster (the respective DZI image is at http://cache.zoom.it/content/wR4i.dzi so internally ClipFlair's image component converts zoom.it URLs to get the real .DZI image and show it)
in ClipFlair Studio Image component you can now use:
ALT + LEFT MOUSE BUTTON CLICK to Zoom-in
ALT + RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON CLICK to Zoom-out
MOUSEWHEEL to ZOOM in/out
MOUSE DRAG to PAN arround the zoomed image
or use the Zoom-in / Zoom-out and Zoom-to-fit UI controls displayed over the image
Note that at all ClipFlair components you can use CTRL + LEFT/RIGHT
MOUSE BUTTON CLICK or CTRL + MOUSEWHEEL to zoom in/out their whole User
Interface (together with their content). If you do that over an empty
position of the activity container, it zooms in/out the whole view on
the activity (each activity is a virtual 5000x5000 space currently).
ClipFlair Activities also have a zoom-to-fit option turned on by
default (you can turn them over with the wrench button on the activity
titlebar to uncheck that option's checkbox) that tries to fit the
activity contents in the current activity window size.


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Found on Bicycling.com and written by Macaela Mackenzie
Grab some string cheese listen up-we've got news to share about why it's time to embrace this calcium boosted food group.
Dairy's reputation has taken a bit of a hit lately. Between almond milk mania and trendy dairy-free diets like the Whole30 and Paleo plans, cow products aren't getting much love.
But according to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, we might want to think twice before switching to soy.
To get a handle on how dairy products impact our weight over time, researchers monitored the dairy intake of over 18,000 normal weight women over the course of 11 years. They found that those who ate more dairy gained less weight than those who consumed little dairy or nixed the nutrition group entirely. Take that, cheese haters! (See how you can start your body transformation with Women's Health's Body Clock Diet.)
What's even crazier is that the effects were strongest in women who consumed more full-fat dairy, like whole milk. In fact, there were no waistline benefits associated with low-fat dairy products at all. (Bye, skim milk.)
Should you take this nod from science as an excuse to make daily trips to the ice cream truck? Not necessarily (though, live your best life). Niket Sonpal, M.D., assistant clinical professor at Tuoro College of Medicine in New York City, says the effects might have more to do with other lifestyle choices.
"Starting out with a normal BMI implies that you exercise or live a healthier lifestyle, and thus a higher fat content in your dairy is a washout. In other words, you started healthier so you stay healthier," he says.
Exactly why dairy helps you stay slim is still a bit foggy. But dairy products contain several nutrients that stave off weight gain, including protein, vitamin D, calcium, and phosphorus, says Sonpal.
The bottom line: Loading up on cheese and milk might not help you lose weight in the short term. But incorporating that good stuff as part of a healthy diet may give future weight gain the boot. We'll take it!
This article first published in Women's Health.


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Given the importance of encryption for privacy and compliance purposes, why is it that enterprises have such a hard time implementing key management? The answer is a lack of cohesive standards across encryption products that allow them to be centrally managed with other vendors' solutions. For example, solutions providing backup tape encryption have key management built in, but they can't interface with the key management system used by the e-mail systems and vice versa.
Without having open standards that all of the encryption vendors embrace and develop to, it's going to be a while before we see truly effective, vendor-agnostic, enterprise key management tools that can simply be dropped into place to manage all of the diverse encryption solutions already deployed within enterprises.
There is hope, however. Standards efforts are currently under way by OASIS and IEEE, and solutions from vendors HP, EMC/RSA, and Thales work by managing keys and certificates through the integrated key management embedded within current encryption products.
Joining the fight to wrangle in management of encryption keys, PGP announced its new PGP Key Management Server just in time for the RSA Conference. The PGP Key Management Server boasts management for symmetric, asymmetric, and proprietary keys, key life cycle, policy enforcement, and reporting.
The last two features often end up as "gotchas" for enterprises. Keeping policies consistent across multivendor platforms is tough. Terminology is never quite the same, getting user access roles correct isn't always straightforward, and often the configuration options vary in granularity.
The policy management hurdle doesn't stop at creating a technical policy. A written policy must first be created that defines key lifetimes, who has access to manage keys, split key assignment across upper management, and similar issues. Once all of those decisions are made and on paper, the hard work of mapping them to technical controls begins.
Of course, as good as policies are, you still have to consider the human factor. This problem is highlighted frighteningly well in the recent "Human Factor in Laptop Encryption" study by the Ponemon Institute and Absolute Software, which found 60 percent of U.S. business managers have circumvented encryption on their laptops.
The Ponemon study contains several other interesting findings, but the numbers surrounding lost laptops are the most disappointing. Ninety-five percent of IT participants reported that a laptop had been lost or stolen in their organizations, which lead to a data breach 72 percent of the time. And in regard to reporting, only 44 percent were able to prove the contents were encrypted.
Next to policy enforcement, reporting is nearly as important. If you can't report whether policies are being properly applied, what's the point of pushing them out? Sure, having key management and showing policies are configured properly can get that compliance check box marked, but auditors are going to want to see some reporting to ensure policies are being enforced.
Detailed reporting also provides IT with the ability to see when users are attempting to circumvent controls like laptop encryption. Businesses also will benefit from having access to detailed reports on policy enforcement since several states have safe-harbor clauses in their data breach laws. Businesses in those states that can prove the lost laptop, smartphone, or other mobile device was encrypted do not have to perform data breach notifications.
The technical issues surrounding enterprise key management are plenty, and hopefully many of them will be resolved as OASIS and IEEE work to develop standards. Beyond standards, enterprise key management systems still need the ability to define consistent policies across multivendor platforms and report on the effectiveness of those policies.
When that happens, enterprises can finally look forward to an interoperable, heterogeneous environment instead of a patchwork of point solutions they're stuck with today.
Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.


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One stock that might be an intriguing choice for investors right now is Standard Motor Products, Inc. SMP. This is because this security in the Automotive - Replacement Parts space is seeing solid earnings estimate revision activity, and is in great company from a Zacks Industry Rank perspective.
This is important because, often times, a rising tide will lift all boats in an industry, as there can be broad trends taking place in a segment that are boosting securities across the board. This is arguably taking place in the Automotive - Replacement Parts space as it currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 72 out of more than 250 industries, suggesting it is well-positioned from this perspective, especially when compared to other segments out there.
Meanwhile, Standard Motor Products is actually looking pretty good on its own too. The firm has seen solid earnings estimate revision activity over the past month, suggesting analysts are becoming a bit more bullish on the firm's prospects in both the short and long term.
Standard Motor Products, Inc. Price and Consensus
Standard Motor Products, Inc. price-consensus-chart | Standard Motor Products, Inc. Quote
In fact, over the past month, current quarter estimates have risen from 69 cents per share to 94 cents per share, while current year estimates have risen from $2.28 per share to $2.61 per share. This has helped SMP to earn a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), further underscoring the company's solid position. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
So, if you are looking for a decent pick in a strong industry, consider Standard Motor Products. Not only is its industry currently in the top third, but it is seeing solid estimate revisions as of late, suggesting it could be a very interesting choice for investors seeking a name in this great industry segment.
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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.


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Airframe Components By Williams, INC.
Airframe Components by Williams, Inc., is a world renowned FAA/EASA approved Certified Repair Station located in the northeast corner of Indiana. With a reputation built on quality and honesty, we believe we have the finest wing and control surface rebuilding facility in the world.
At the present time, we have over 2,000 wing cores, as well as over 6,000 control surfaces. All repaired units are sent out with work orders and yellow tags. We maintain a large supply of aluminum, ribs, and spars to help minimize your downtime. By checking the Parts List, you will have access to an extensive inventory of miscellaneous aircraft parts. The parts list changes weekly, so be sure to check back for updated and new inventory. Contact us to inquire about or purchase a part.


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New Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Cargo Van 4X4 for Sale in Victoria, BC
Thank you for your interest in this particular model! While it looks like we may not have this particular model in stock at the moment, we are happy to share that we have vehicles coming in each and every day and thus, some may have just not yet made it online. We sincerely appreciate your time and as such, we encourage you to connect with us by filling out the form below and a member of our team will contact you shortly to advise of any models that may not be showing. If it's more convenient, we also invite you to call us at 250-385-6737 for more information.


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"Chapter 7: The Significance of the Resurrection," Teachings of Presidents of the Church: David O. McKay (2011), 60–69
"Chapter 7," Teachings: David O. McKay, 60–69
Chapter 7
The Significance of the Resurrection
As Christ lives after death, so shall all men, each taking that place in the next world for which he is best fitted.1
In 1912, Elder David O. McKay, then a member of the Twelve, and his wife, Emma Ray, experienced their first great sorrow in parenthood when their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Royle, passed away. Elder McKay's account of the event shows the heartache he felt but also demonstrates his faith in a future resurrection:
"Mon., 8 April 1912. O what a night of suffering for our darling boy! Every breath he drew seemed agony to him! The doctors examined him this morning, and discovered that his pain was due to pleurisy [inflammation of the lung] on both sides. At this we almost lost hope; but later when [the doctor] told us that by an examination he knew what germ had caused the infection and that he had the anti-toxin, we again took courage.
"But Royle was too weak and the complications of diseases too many. He battled bravely all day, taking the little stimulant given him at intervals as willingly as a grown person would. At 9:30 p.m., Papa, Thomas E. [McKay] and I again administered to him. Ray felt very hopeful, and lay down on the cot beside him for a little rest. Soon his little pulse weakened, and we knew that our baby would soon leave us. 'Mama' was the last word on his precious lips. Just before the end came, he stretched out his little hands, and as I stooped to caress him, he encircled my neck, and gave me the last of many of the most loving caresses ever a father received from a darling child. It seemed he realized that he was going, and wanted to say, 'Goodbye, Papa,' but his little voice was already stilled by weakness and pain. I am sure he recognized his Mama a moment later. She had rested only a few minutes; and noticing that the nurses were somewhat agitated, she was bending over her darling baby in a second and did not leave him until we gently led her from the room from which Death had taken our baby boy.
"The end came at 1:50 a.m., without even a twitch of a muscle. 'He is not dead but sleepeth' was never more applicable to any soul, for he truly went to sleep. He did not die."2
Teachings of David O. McKay
Jesus' Apostles became witnesses of the reality of His Resurrection.
About two thousand years ago … there were some pretty gloomy apostles. Peter was heavy-hearted; John was grieving; as was Mary, Christ's Mother. The other apostles had fled. Judas had realized what a crime he had committed. What a gloomy night!
Next morning Christ arose. … That being true, this event establishes the immortality of the soul, the existence of loved ones who are on the other side, their personality persisting. They are as real in that spiritual realm as Christ's spirit when He preached to the spirits in prison.3
Nearness to the event [of Jesus' Resurrection] gives increased value to the evidence given by the Apostles. A deeper value of their testimony lies in the fact that with Jesus' death the Apostles were stricken with discouragement and gloom. For two and a half years they had been upheld and inspired by Christ's presence. But now he was gone. They were left alone, and they seemed confused and helpless. …
"What was it that suddenly changed these disciples to confident, fearless, heroic preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? It was the revelation that Christ had risen from the grave. His promises had been kept, his Messianic mission fulfilled." …
Mark does not himself recount any appearance of the risen Lord; but he testifies that the angel at the tomb announced the resurrection, and promised that the Lord would meet his disciples. From Mark we hear the glorious proclamation of the first empty tomb in all the world. For the first time in the history of man the words "Here lies" were supplanted by the divine message "He is risen." No one can doubt that Mark was not convinced in his soul of the reality of the empty tomb. To him the resurrection was not questionable—it was real; and the appearance of his Lord and Master among men was a fact established in his mind beyond the shadow of a doubt. To the proclaiming of this truth he devoted his life, and if tradition can be relied upon, he sealed his testimony with his blood.
Another who records the testimony of eye witnesses was Luke, a Gentile, or, as some think, a proselyte of Antioch in Syria, where he followed the profession of physician. (Col. 4:14.) Even some of his most severe modern critics have placed him in the first rank of an historian, and his personal contact with early apostles makes his statements of inestimable value.
What he wrote was the result of personal inquiry and investigation, and was drawn from all available sources. Particularly he interviewed and recorded the declarations of those "who from the beginning were [eye] witnesses and ministers of the Word." He avers that he "accurately traced all things from the very first," so that he might "write them in order." [See Luke 1:1–4.] This means that Luke obtained the testimony of these "eye witnesses" directly from themselves and not from previous narratives.
According to all trustworthy testimony, we have the Gospel of Luke as it came from his hand. In chapter 24, Luke testifies to the divine message: "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." [Luke 24:5–6.]
With equal assurance as to their accuracy we can accept his statements and witness in regard to Peter's and Paul's and other apostles' testimony regarding the resurrection. "To whom also Christ showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." [See Acts 1:3.] Who can doubt Luke's absolute confidence in the reality of the resurrection?
It is true that neither Mark nor Luke testifies to having personally seen the risen Lord, and therefore, some urge that their recorded testimonies cannot be taken as first hand evidence. That they do not so testify, and yet were convinced that others did see Him, shows how incontrovertible was the evidence among the apostles and other disciples that the resurrection was a reality.
Fortunately, however, there is a document which does give the personal testimony of an eye witness to an appearance of Jesus after his death and burial. This personal witness also corroborates the testimony not only of the two men whom I have quoted but of others also. I refer to Saul, a Jew of Tarsus, educated at the feet of Gamaliel, a strict Pharisee, and before his conversion a bitter persecutor of all who believed in Jesus of Nazareth as having risen from the dead. And now in the oldest authentic document in existence relating or testifying to the resurrection of Christ, we find Paul saying this to the Corinthians:
"For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures; and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the Twelve. After that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." [1 Corinthians 15:3–8.]4
Worldly skepticism cannot negate the testimony of eyewitnesses.
Too many today are like the men on Mars' Hill two thousand years ago who erected an altar to "The Unknown God," but who knew little or nothing about him. We read that on his way to the Areopagus, Paul had beheld magnificent statues erected to various gods. … Here frequently gathered philosophers and judges, the ablest thinkers, the wisest sages of the ancient world, considering and discoursing on the mysteries of life and the destiny of the human race.
In the midst of all this worldly wisdom there stood a lonely little brown-eyed man who challenged much of their philosophy as false and their worship of images as gross error—the only man in that great city of intellectuals who knew by actual experience that a man may pass through the portals of death and live. … As Paul discoursed eloquently on the personality of God, the philosophers listened curiously though attentively until he testified that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
When they heard of the resurrection, some mocked and all but a few turned away, leaving him who had declared the truth even more lonely than ever. [See Acts 17:22–33.] Today, as on Mars' Hill, when we speak of the resurrection of the dead, there are some who mock and others who doubt and turn away. Today, as then, too many men and women have other gods to which they give more thought than to the resurrected Lord. …
Establish it as a fact that Christ did take up His body and appeared as a glorified, resurrected Being, and you answer the question of the ages—"If a man dies, shall he live again?" [See Job 14:14.]
That the literal resurrection from the grave was a reality to the disciples who knew Christ intimately is a certainty. In their minds there was absolutely no doubt. They were witnesses of the fact. They knew because their eyes beheld, their ears heard, their hands felt the corporal presence of the risen Redeemer.5
That the spirit of man passes triumphantly through the portals of death into everlasting life is one of the glorious messages given by Christ, our Redeemer. To him this earthly career is but a day and its closing but the setting of life's sun. Death, but a sleep, is followed by a glorious awakening in the morning of an eternal realm. When Mary and Martha saw their brother only as a corpse in the dark and silent tomb, Christ saw him still a living being. This fact he expressed in two words: "… Lazarus sleepeth. …" (John 11:11.) If everyone … knew that the crucified Christ actually rose on the third day—that after having greeted others and mingled with others in the spirit world, his spirit did again reanimate his pierced body, and after sojourning among men for the space of forty days, he ascended a glorified soul to his Father—what benign peace would come to souls now troubled with doubt and uncertainty!
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stands with Peter, with Paul, with James, and with all the other early apostles who accepted the resurrection not only as being literally true, but as the consummation of Christ's divine mission on earth.6
The latest and greatest confirmation that Jesus rose from the grave is the appearance of the Father and the Son to the Prophet Joseph Smith, nineteen hundred years after the event. … This miracle of life is significant not only in itself, but in its connotation of all the basic principles of true Christianity.7
Christ's Resurrection affirms the omnipotence of God and the immortality of man.
For over four thousand years, man had looked into the grave and had seen only the end of life. Of all the millions who had entered therein, not one person had ever returned as a resurrected, immortal being. "There was in all earth's area, not one empty grave. No human heart believed; no human voice declared that there was such a grave—a grave robbed by the power of a Victor stronger than man's great enemy, Death."
It was, therefore, a new and glorious message that the angel gave to the women who fearfully and lovingly had approached the sepulcher in which Jesus had been buried: "… Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him." (Mark 16:6.)
If a miracle is a supernatural event whose antecedent forces are beyond man's finite wisdom, then the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most stupendous miracle of all time. In it stand revealed the omnipotence of God and the immortality of man.
The resurrection is a miracle, however, only in the sense that it is beyond man's comprehension and understanding. To all who accept it as fact, it is but a manifestation of a uniform law of life. Because man does not understand the law, he calls it a miracle.8
Resurrection and Spring are happily associated, not that there is anything in nature exactly analogous to the resurrection, but there is so much which suggests an awakening thought. Like the stillness of death Old Winter has held all vegetable life in his grasp, but as Spring approaches the tender life-giving power of heat and light compels him to relinquish his grip, and what seems to have been dead comes forth in newness of life, refreshed, invigorated, strengthened after a peaceful sleep.
So it is with man. What we call death Jesus referred to as sleep. "Lazarus sleeps," he said to his disciples [see John 11:11]. "The damsel sleepeth," were his comforting words to the bereaved and sorrowing parents of a little girl [see Mark 5:39]. Indeed, to the Savior of the world there is no such thing as death—only life—eternal life. Truly he could say, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live." [John 11:25.]
With this assurance, obedience to eternal law should be a joy, not a burden, for life is joy, life is love. … Obedience to Christ and his laws brings life. May each recurring Easter emphasize this truth, and fill our souls with the divine assurance that Christ is truly risen, and through him man's immortality secured.9
The faithful receive the comforting testimony of the Resurrection.
There is no cause to fear death; it is but an incident in life. It is as natural as birth. Why should we fear it? Some fear it because they think it is the end of life, and life often is the dearest thing we have. Eternal life is man's greatest blessing.
If only men would "do his will" [see John 7:17], instead of looking hopelessly at the dark and gloomy tomb, they would turn their eyes heavenward and know that Christ is risen!
No man can accept the resurrection and be consistent in his belief without accepting also the existence of a personal God. Through the resurrection Christ conquered death and became an immortal soul. "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28) was not merely an idle exclamation of Thomas when he beheld his risen Lord. Once we accept Christ as divine, it is easy to visualize his Father as being just as personal as he; for, said Jesus, "… he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. …" (John 14:9.)10
As Christ lived after death so shall all men, each taking his place in the next world for which he has best fitted himself. The message of the resurrection, therefore, is the most comforting, the most glorious ever given to man, for when death takes a loved one from us, our sorrowing hearts are assuaged by the hope and the divine assurance expressed in the words:
"He is not here: he is risen." [See Matthew 28:6.] Because our Redeemer lives so shall we. I bear you witness that He does live. I know it, as I hope you know that divine truth.11
Jesus passed through all the experiences of mortality just as you and I. He knew happiness, he experienced pain. He rejoiced as well as sorrowed with others. He knew friendship. He experienced, also, the sadness that comes through traitors and false accusers. He died a mortal death even as you will. Since Christ lived after death, so shall you, and so shall I. …
Jesus was the one perfect man who ever lived. In rising from the dead, he conquered death and is now Lord of the earth. How utterly weak, how extremely foolish is he who would willfully reject Christ's way of life, especially in the light of the fact that such rejection leads only to unhappiness, misery, and even to death! …
When Christians throughout the world have this faith [in Jesus Christ] coursing in their veins, when they feel a loyalty in their hearts to the Resurrected Christ and to the principles connoted thereby, mankind will have taken the first great step toward the perpetual peace for which we are daily praying.12
There are many so-called Christians who do not believe in the literal resurrection, and upon your shoulders and the shoulders of … others in this Church rests the responsibility of declaring to the world his divine Son-ship, his literal resurrection from the grave, and his appearance in person in the presence of the Father to the prophet Joseph Smith.13
Suggestions for Study and Discussion
What evidence exists of the literal Resurrection of Jesus Christ? (See pages 62–64, 66.) How has your testimony of Jesus' Resurrection been strengthened by the witness of His ancient and modern-day Apostles?
In what ways does "worldly wisdom" attempt to dispute the reality of Jesus' Resurrection? (See pages 64–65.)
How is the doctrine of the Resurrection a fundamental part of the plan of salvation?
President McKay taught that the Resurrection is a "manifestation of a uniform law of life" and that "Resurrection and Spring are happily associated." In what ways is the Resurrection similar to spring? (See pages 66–67.) How might you use this analogy to help children understand the Resurrection?
How can we gain or strengthen a testimony of the Resurrection? (See pages 67–68.) How does your testimony of the Resurrection influence the decisions you make? What other gospel principles are more easily understood after we have a testimony of the Resurrection?
How does a knowledge of the Resurrection lessen the sorrow associated with death and help comfort those who mourn? (See pages 67–68.) What examples have you seen of people being strengthened in trials by their testimony of the Resurrection?
Why is the existence of a resurrected God so important to mankind?
Related Scriptures: Job 19:25–27; Mark 16:1–6; Acts 2:22–32; 4:33; 1 Corinthians 15:3–8; 3 Nephi 11:15; D&C 76:22–24


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TMW 2014: Official People's Choice Voting starts.
Official Voting for the 'TGPC People's Choice Award' to select one of the Semifinalists of 'Top Model Of the World 2014' has started. This year, 45 contestants are vying for the ultimate title of TMW-2014. The contest is being mentored by Mr. Detlef, President of TMW, and is taking place in El Gouna, Egypt and will conclude on 11th of Arpil 2014. We shall officially be covering the whole pageant activities, with exciting reviews. Stay tuned with us for updates…!!!
The winner of the voting poll for 'TGPC People's Choice Award' shall get a direct entry to the final 15/10. You may vote for more than one girls and may vote as many times as you like for your favourite. So brace your shoe and start VOTING for your favourite.
( Note: To all those who are suffering from Cooling off period, this can happen for two reasons 1) You are voting too fast which is considered is bot spam and hence you get blocked for some time. So once you vote, refresh the page and then vote. Don't vote in multiple tabs. This may result into spam. 2) Too many people voting in one click which results into jamming of website, so please allow sometime for website to restore.)


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It's a near-weekly occurrence: HTC, or Motorola, or someone releases a brand-new Android phone. There are a ton of them! But really, there are only a few worth buying. Here are the best Android phones on each carrier.
Choosing an Android phone is just like choosing any other cellphone, except easier: You're already onboard with the Android operating system, you're prepared to shell out for a data plan, and probably have a more specific idea of what you want in a phone than your average buyer. Accordingly, similar rules apply:
• Don't buy something that's going to be obsolete before you're halfway through your contract.
• Generally, ignore the upfront price—the total tally for your cellphone contract is going to make your smartphone's $200 seem like spare change.
• Look forward. Google updates their Android software at a breakneck pace. This is awesome if your phone is ready for the upgrades, and demoralizing if it isn't—and a lot of current handsets are getting left behind. This has serious implications in terms of app compatibility—do you really want to buy a phone that can't even run Google's Navigation software?
So! The calculus is simple: Buy the Android phone that is objectively one of the best, or you'll probably regret it. Here are your choices:
T-Mobile is the grandfather of all things Android. They had the first phone! And the second. (Also, did you know they're still selling the G1, right now? Nuts.) It's weird, then, that their Android line has thinned down into an anemic, uninspiring mishmash of oldish hardware and Android's few legitimate pariahs. Luckily, they've got a savior outside of their official lineup: The Nexus One.
It's the best Android phone that you can buy today, and that's saying a lot: It's got a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and beautiful AMOLED screen, Android 2.1 and a bright future for software upgrades, since, after all, it's the Google Phone. It retails for $180 with contract or $530 without, at Google.
If you need a keyboard, go with the Motorola Cliq, at $150. It's far from futureproof, though, with and older generation of hardware and a certain delay for software upgrades, since Motorola needs to update their Motoblur software shell for any new OS releases. Stick with the Nexus One if you can.
Sprint rode the crest of the second Android wave, landing the America version of the well-reviewed HTC Hero. Then, like T-Mobile, their lineup started to look less and less competitive, as phones like the Droid came to market. Now, they're back out in front with the HTC Evo, the first 4G handset in the US, and by far the most impressive Android phone available.
It's got a 4.3-inch screen, HTC's generally helpful Sense Android interface, an 8MP camera, and what the hell, a kickstand. 4G's only a selling point if you live within Sprint's limited WiMax coverage area, but if you do, you can use the Evo's hotspot feature to share the connection with a handful of other devices over Wi-Fi. And even without 4G, it's still king of the hill. Minor catch: It's not out yet. It's expected in June, when it'll probably cost $200—though it could conceivably be higher.
If you need a keyboard, you're nearly out of luck on Sprint. You could go with the Samsung Moment, but really, you shouldn't. Nut up and deal with the soft keyboard—on a 4.3-inch screen, it's really not that big of a deal.
AT&T got into the Android game late, and they started with a spread of mid-level phones, like the Backflip, and soon, the Dell Aero. But as with T-Mobile, your best option lies outside of AT&T: The AT&T-compatible Nexus One.
But there's a much larger catch this time around: It's $530. There is no on-contract option, so your phone won't be subsidized. On the plus side, you won't be stuck in any kind of contract at all if you're already an AT&T customer, but still, steep.
So here, your second choice, the Backflip, may seem a bit more compelling. Not only does it have a keyboard, but it'll only run you $100, and it's due for the 2.1 update sooner rather than later. But again, consider what you're getting yourself into. Two years with a phone you don't really want isn't worth saving a few hundred dollars, and signing a new blood contract with your carrier—you can always resell the Nexus One!
Verizon took Android mainstream with the Droid, which, up until the Nexus One came out, was the best Android piece you could buy. Today, they've done themselves one better with the HTC Droid Incredible, which matches or beats the Nexus One (which, by the way, both Sprint and Verizon are due to get sometime soon) in almost every respect.
It's got a 480x800 AMOLED screen, a Snapdragon processor (like the Nexus One) and an 8MP camera, to start. It's due on April 29th.
If you want a keyboard, though, the original Droid is still a reasonable choice. Obsolescence isn't something you have to worry about in the near-term, and it's generally been quick to receive major software updates. It can be had for significantly under its $200 retail price, too.
You may have noticed a theme here: All of the top phones are made by HTC, and all of these phones share similar spec sheets—in fact, they all run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, which is, for now, the fastest available. The downside is a lack of diversity; the upside, though, is that no single carrier has that much of a hardware advantage, so you shouldn't feel the need to switch carriers.


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When it comes to audio quality, the studio has to be a no-compromise zone. Which makes it the perfect place for Sennheiser products. Sennheiser headphones, in this case.
When you're in charge of the sound of a program, you had better make sure it comes across in the best quality possible. Sennheiser has the professional equipment you can rely on in any broadcast scenario.
Sennheiser is the favorite choice of many great DJs. Our sturdy, intelligently designed headphones have a built-in understanding of how DJs work—and provide outstanding sound. They are guaranteed to become an integral part of your set.
The video you capture on your smartphone is in incredible visual definition. Your audio should be just as pristine. Discover the AMBEO Smart Headset and bring rich, 3D audio to bear on all your high-definition videos.
A natural and detailed sound, effective noise attenuation, and the ability to handle high volume levels should be in the DNA of every headphones made to cope with the studio routine, as well as a robust construction and excellent wearing comfort. In addition, Sennheiser throws in intelligent features such as ActiveGard®, which protects from extreme audio peaks, and intuitive operation. To top it off, high-quality headset microphones ensure outstanding speech intelligibility in any surrounding. After all, we've been developing studio equipment for over 70 years.
Your audience depends on you to receive perfect sound—so you need to broadcast it. That's why the quality of monitoring headphones must be beyond doubt. They should also keep outside noise out, and emphasize voice intelligibility. Sennheiser broadcast headsets offer all that along with intelligent features, intuitive operation, sturdy design, and high wearing comfort.
DJ headphones must be no less than a perfect assistant. They have to block outside noise, and keep the flow with intuitive operation and sturdy design. At all times they have to sound great, muster a high maximum sound pressure level, and be so comfortable to wear that they almost become a part of the head. DJ headphones from Sennheiser deliver all this with a special extra feature you see in every part and detail–decades of experience as manufacturer of high-end studio equipment.
Impossibly immersive. Record every sonic detail, from every angle, to transport your audience to the exact moment your video was captured. Signature Sennheiser sound quality, and smart features like Active Noise Cancelling and Transparent Hearing, are just the beginning. Your world is three-dimensional: make your audio 3D to match. Welcome to the Future of Audio, brought to you by Sennheiser and AMBEO.
Enjoy excellent Sennheiser audio while talking over the Internet, e-learning, or gaming. Our headsets made for Internet communication are extremely lightweight and comfortable for hours of continuous use, as well as built to last a long time despite everyday wear. High-quality noise-cancelling microphones ensure that your voice is always clearly understood during your Internet conversations. While you focus on what you want to communicate, let Sennheiser make sure nothing gets lost in transmission.


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- As the founder, guitarist and driving influence behind Black Flag, Greg Ginn defined the west coast punk sound and the DIY ethos of punk rock. Through his record label SST, Ginn has tirelessly performed, produced and released new music by himself ‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±___as well as from an eclectic array of independent artists.
Professional skateboarder and musician, Mike Vallely first saw Black Flag perform at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey in 1984. Crediting it as a life changing experience, Mike set forth from that show on an uncharted course of self-expression through his skating. Discovered by Stacy Peralta in 1986, Mike turned pro in 1987 and has had an un-paralleled skateboard career. His first band Mike V And The Rats was formed in 2001.
Greg and Mike first met in Long Beach, CA in May of 2003 when Mike V And The Rats started a supporting run of shows for Greg that would eventually lead to Mike doing a guest vocal spot at the Black Flag Reunion Shows in September 2003. A friendship was formed and the two have kept in touch through the years with the intention of collaborating on new music at some point.‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±___
In February of 2012 Greg presented Mike with some music. Mike spent the next 5 months filling notebooks with lyric ideas that would eventually become the debut release from Good For You, Life Is Too Short To Not Hold A Grudge.‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±__‰ۡóÁÌ_åÈí«ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__ÌÎÌ_ÌÎÌÊÌÎÌ__Ì_å±___
Recorded in Taylor, Texas Life Is Too Short... is an angst ridden recording of high energy rock songs blistered with themes of betrayal, regret, disillusionment as well as resolve, determination and independence.
- Recorded at Casa Destroy Studios in Taylor, TX
- Produced by Greg Ginn
- Engineered and Mastered by Mike Shear
- www.goodforyouband.com


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Artists of the Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") movement, which thrived in Russia around the turn of the 20th century, are represented in the exhibition "Mir Iskusstva: Russia's Age of Elegance," on view at the University Art Museum through June 11.
Drawn from the holdings of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the works in the exhibition were long suppressed because this last flowering of Russian imperial culture did not conform to the artistic philosophy of the Soviet government. The exhibition is the first opportunity for people in America to see this material, which is now being re-evaluated by the Russians.
In contrast to the later doctrines of Socialist Realism imposed by the Soviet government, it was the motto "art for art's sake" that united the Mir Iskusstva artists, who sought to create a Russian art parallel to that of Western Europe. Loosely grouped under the leadership of the editor of the periodical Mir Iskusstva and the future ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the movement's artists valued decorative arts and theatrical design as much as painting, sculpture and architecture. The colorful works seen in art exhibitions and the ballets Diaghilev brought to Paris beginning in 1909 became a revelation to tastemakers and artists of the avant-garde in Western European art.
The exhibition includes more than 80 objects in a wide range of media -- paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, book and stage designs, and ceramics. Organized by the Foundation for International Arts and Education in Bethesda, Md., the exhibition is presented in conjunction with the State Russian Museum and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
This exhibition has special ties to the University as it was initiated by two members of the class of 1962: Greg Guroff, president of the Foundation for International Arts and Education; and Tony Evnin, a supporter of the foundation. Evnin has a particular interest in the art of this period because his mother, Nina Schick, studied with one of the Mir Iskusstva movement's premier painters, Sergei Sudeikin; Schick's portrait by her teacher is included in the exhibition.
The exhibition has inspired a number of collaborative events throughout the University and community. Princeton faculty members Ellen Chances of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Simon Morrison of the Department of Music contributed essays to the catalog and will participate in public programs accompanying the exhibition. The Program in Theater and Dance presented "L'Après-midi d'un Faune" by Russian choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky in February as part of its Spring Dance Festival.
"We are delighted to be the only East Coast venue for the Mir Iskusstva exhibition," said Susan Taylor, director of the University Art Museum. "It provides a remarkable opportunity for our audiences to experience the extraordinary cultural achievements of this movement and an unprecedented occasion for the Princeton museum and its University and community colleagues to collaborate on the many dimensions -- historical, cultural, artistic and literary -- that illuminate this richly complex period."
For more information on the exhibition and related events, visit the art museum Web site.


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Contemporary thinking has it that certain genes doom children to higher risk of depression, ADHD, and other difficulties. But in the right environment, these same genes may actually help kids thrive.
In an Atlantic essay called "The Science of Success," David Dobbs writes about two types of children: "orchids" and "dandelions." Dandelion children tend to do pretty well no matter what environment they grow up in. Orchid children, meanwhile, may develop behavior or mood problems in abusive or neglectful homes — but in loving ones, they may thrive even more than dandelions. And according to new research, the difference between dandelions and orchids may be genetic. For instance, kids with a certain variant of a dopamine-processing gene are at greater risk of ADHD and "externalizing behavior" (i.e. "acting out") than other children. But in one study, these kids also improved much more in response to a video-based behavioral intervention than did kids who didn't have the at-risk variant. Similarly, rhesus monkeys with another gene variant (one associated with depression in humans) are worse at processing serotonin than their peers if they are raised as orphans. But when raised by a loving monkey mother, these seemingly at-risk animals process serotonin more efficiently than other monkeys, and are also more socially successful. These and other studies suggest that certain genes confer not risk per se, but a kind of openness to environmental stimuli, positive or negative. Dobbs writes,
At first glance, this idea, which I'll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it's actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the "bad" gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.
Dobbs spends a lot of time talking about the population-level implications of this new idea. He points out "that a genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another" and that "every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant-and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent-than the norm." If the orchid hypothesis is true, then perhaps a certain number of people who react extremely strongly to their environment, even if these reactions seem negative to our modern eyes, may be important to the flexibility and survival of our species. But what I found most interesting about Dobbs's piece was its implications for the individual. Dobbs writes of his decision to get tested for a gene variant that increases depression risk but may also confer orchid-like properties. A depression sufferer himself, he turned out to have the variant. Dobbs writes,
[A]s I sat absorbing this information, the chill came to seem less the coldness of fear than a shiver of abrupt and inverted self-knowledge-of suddenly knowing with certainty something I had long suspected, and finding that it meant something other than I thought it would. The orchid hypothesis suggested that this particular allele, the rarest and riskiest of the serotonin-transporter gene's three variants, made me not just more vulnerable but more plastic. And that new way of thinking changed things. I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience-every intervention I ran on myself, as it were-would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard-slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same.
In this early age of genetic testing, it's easy to think of genes simplistically — and since most testing is still meant to predict disease, our genotypes sometimes begin to seem like maps full of danger signs. But human beings (and monkeys, too) are extraordinarily complicated, and what seems like a risk may also be a blessing. We still tend to see depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other mood and behavioral abnormalities as defects — if a child is "at risk" for one of these, she needs to be protected as though from a gathering storm. Yet to be at risk may also be to have a unique opportunity.
If the orchid hypothesis is true, then people like Dobbs may possess a plasticity that makes them more vulnerable to sorrow and yet also more capable of change. This would have enormous implications for those suffering from certain mental ailments. Perhaps along with their difficulties, their genes have granted them a tool for solving them — and beyond that, for reaching new heights of personal fulfillment. It would also have an impact on how we raise and teach kids. Some have already speculated that children with ADHD need something different from the one-size-fits-all American educational model. If it's true that some kids are uniquely influenced by environment, then maybe what we need is not to try to make them more like other kids — the current approach — but rather to construct the environment that will best help them thrive. This is likely to be difficult, and expensive, and for these reasons it may not catch on. But we might have much to gain, both as individuals and as a society, by seeing a springboard where we once saw a trapdoor.
The Science Of Success [Atlantic]


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Top Stories: Cain, Storm, Occupy Arrests
Good morning.
Our early headlines were:
-- Reporter: Herman Cain Story Based On Documentation, Dozens Of Sources
-- No Treat: About Two Million Still Without Power In Northeast
The morning's other major stories include:
-- "Occupy" Arrests In Virginia, Oregon, Texas, Colorado. ( The Associated Press)
-- "U.S. Seeks Aid From Pakistan in Afghan Peace Effort."( The New York Times)
-- "U.S. Had Advance Warning Of Abuse At Afghan Prisons, Officials Say."( The Washington Post)
-- "Nations Grow Populations, And Face New Problems."( Morning Edition)
-- Boeing Expected To Announce Plan To Build Commercial Space Vehicle At Kennedy Space Center. ( Florida Today)
-- Qantas Is Flying Again, But "Unlikely To Be Fully Operational Until Wednesday." ( The Australian)
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.