tisiwoota

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingèd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

Poem Before Pronouns

No water, lots of glaciers.
There was one bird

but she had no nest.
It got colder.

There were neither humans
nor gorillas: too cold

to go outside and work.
Finally, things began to change.

An onion grew somewhere.
Seeds got invented.

Somewhere else, one lizard
walked across a desert

and found the other lizard.
There was a blue warmth.

There was a blue warmth
and still some things began

to grow fur–as if they knew
it will be cold again.

-Thomas Lux

1. The Myth of Mars and Venus. Debunking myths about differences in language use by men and women.

2. The Secret of Intangible Wealth

A Mexican migrant to the U.S. is five times more productive than one who stays home. Why is that? The answer is not the obvious one: This country has more machinery or tools or natural resources. Instead, according to some remarkable but largely ignored research—by the World Bank, of all places—it is because the average American has access to over $418,000 in intangible wealth, while the stay-at-home Mexican’s intangible wealth is just $34,000.

3. TheOnion as Model Newspaper?

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print circulation during the last three years? … But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

4. Menstral Blood as New Source of Stem Cells? A new wrinkle in the stem cell debate…

5. China Cop Uses Google Earth to Arrest a Human Trafficker. Cool story…