![]() ![]() Ram Dass said the subjects found bliss, heightened physical senses, accelerated thought processes, a relaxing of biases and hallucinatory experiences, such as seeing God. ![]() ![]() Ram Dass and Leary wanted to open the mind to a deeper consciousness and conducted experiments that included giving the drug to "jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists." Afterward, they had them fill out questionnaires about their experiences. In his first psychedelic experience, "the rug crawled and the picture smiled, all of which delighted me," Ram Dass wrote in Be Here Now. Ram Dass had been introduced to marijuana in 1955 by his first patient while working as a health services counselor at Stanford University, but Leary took him farther with psilocybin, the compound that gives certain mushrooms hallucinogenic qualities. Things began to change when Leary joined the Harvard faculty and the two became close friends. In the meantime, please share reflections on Ram Dass via or #lovingramdass /zt49qS01jt- Dass would later describe himself at the time as a driven "anxiety-neurotic" who had an abundance of knowledge but lacked wisdom. Memorial services will be announced shortly.He was a guide for thousands seeking to discover or reclaim their spiritual identity beyond or within institutional religion. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The gene is the beautiful and powerful idea that explains biology. Mukherjee sees the gene as “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science”, and he ranks it with the atom as an idea that has transformed our understanding of the natural world. The past 50 years have seen genetics emerge, in the words of Bryan Appleyard, as “the most restless, turbulent and demanding form of knowledge that our species has yet produced”. ![]() The first century of genetics was of little interest to the general public, as I found out at dinner parties in the 1960s. He writes well, often pithily, in his mostly excellent, though occasionally protracted, history of the gene. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a molecular biologist at Columbia University who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and whose family has been affected by heritable illness, is well-placed to explain this complex topic. If something is in your DNA, this means it's in your genes. ![]() Well, DNA is the chemical genes are made of. The problem, of course, is that most readers do not know what the term means. When The Irish Times says, as it did last month, that "innovation is in our DNA", as a geneticist I might be pleased. ![]() ![]() ![]() While Northup’s first-person account of his years as a slave makes for an unusual slave narrative (few slaves earned the freedom or possessed the opportunity to tell their stories as Northup did), McQueen and Ridley designed a less subjective style for their film. The film was lauded with critical and commercial acclaim, culminating with a Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. Upon its initial publication, his story came as enlightening to a society on the brink of a Civil War over slavery, but it fell out of print and favor until nearly a century later, when it was resurrected by historians Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon with historical annotations.ĭirector Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley’s film of the same name provides an emotionally effective and technically proficient means of retelling the slave narrative. Northup’s memoir is framed entirely from his own first-person narration, supplemented by accounts of facts he gathered after gaining his freedom. 12 Years a Slave is based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man from Saratoga, New York who was kidnapped and then spent twelve years in the South as a slave in Bayou Bouef, Louisiana. ![]() ![]() ![]() She sees a bottle which has the words on it: ‘Drink me’. Behind this door lies a beautiful garden. He goes into this big rabbit hole and Alice follows him down into Wonderland. ![]() When Alice one day sits on a riverbank with her sister a strange white rabbit comes by and he talks to himself. The story takes place nowadays in Wonderland. Where and when does the story take place? Alice has a lot of adventures in Wonderland and everything keeps on getting stranger.ĥ. Alice follows him and from that moment Alice is caught in a land of all kinds of animals. One day she sees a rabbit which is going into a big rabbit hole. ![]() The reason why the book is called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is because the story is about a girl named Alice. Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. His most famous books are Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass. He died on the 14th of January 1898 in Guildford. He was born on the 27th of January in 1832 in Daresbury. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It shows how the human race might evolve naturally or be adapted to face life under the sea or in space. Man After Man is an illustrated anthropology of the future. But can old age, illness and the pressure of evolution be held at bay for ever by medicine and science?ĭougal Dixon, the bestselling author of After Man, and a science writer specializing in evolution and palaeontology tackles these key questions and presents a vision of the next 5 million years based on the known principles of evolution and ecology, and the possibilities present within genetic engineering. What is our future? Will the human race exist in a 1,000 years time? In 10,000 years? In a 100,000 years time? If so, what will we look like and how will we behave? How will we have developed or adapted, and why? What will be the effect of that change on other animals?Īt present, Man as a species is outside evolution – supported by an advanced technology that shapes nature to fit the short-term requirements of Homo sapiens. ![]() ![]() ![]() She has a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. She now challenges anyone who believes romance is “easy to write” to write their own book and try to get published in one year’s time. In that time, she also made the finals in the Toronto Romance Writers’ Golden Opportunity Contest in 2009 and won in the Contemporary Series Category in 2010. ![]() It took three years of grueling work before she finally sold her third book, Fighting for Her Love (retitled Her Son’s Hero for publication), to Harlequin Superromance. She’d never read what she used to call a “real” romance book until she started working at Harlequin Enterprises, the world’s largest publisher of women’s fiction, as a proofreader.Īfter reading her first few romance novels, she thought, “If they can do it, so can I!” After all, she believed, like so many people still do, that romance was “based on a formula,” that “anyone could write a romance” and that “They’ll publish anything!”Īfter the first year of writing and attending workshops, she couldn’t believe how naïve she’d been. Vicki Essex (pseudonym) is a romance writer in Toronto, Canada. ![]() ![]() With often ambitious, off-kilter vantage points, his images of ballerinas numbered approximately 1,500 works, all deeply invested in the physicality and the discipline of dance. His subjects centered on the teeming, noisy streets of Paris, as well as its leisure entertainments, such as horse racing, cabarets, and, most particularly, ballet. The elder scion of a wealthy family, Degas cofounded a series of exhibitions of "Impressionist" art, but soon disassociated himself from the group in pursuit of a more realist approach. ![]() Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and everyday urban life. ![]() ![]() ![]() With all this now laid as bedrock, Professor Charles Xavier approaches the global stage with a positive, pro-active, worldwide agenda. ![]() Plus, mutants now have a language of their own for, without language, how can they hope to have a culture? ![]() As if that weren't clever enough, Hickman hasn't even had to invent their home - it's an established part of mutant lore - but he has extrapolated infinitely more potential from its nature than any writer has been imagined before. The latter derives firmly from the former, thereby securing its stature, and indeed future.ĭidn't you ever wonder how ridiculous it was that Charles Xavier could somehow sustain a Westchester mansion housing, feeding, clothing and presumably funding several dozen Playstations for nearly one hundred mutants.? For decades.? Let alone defend it!Īll of this - all of it - is secured by their new base of operations and its "produce". ![]() Exceptionally eloquent and comprehensively thought-through elevation of the mutant legacy.įor the very first time the X-Men have a geopolitical power base and a global economy of their own. ![]() ![]() The treacly souled boy is now a 23-year-old man, healed of his disability ("all that's left, really, is the limp, which to hear others tell it is not a limp but a lilt, a slight hesitation my right leg makes before greeting the pavement, a metrical shyness"). This book takes up Tim's story during the Christmas season of 1860 - nearly two decades after the events recounted in A Christmas Carol. Thank heavens, then, for Louis Bayard, who reinvents the plucky little cripple in his new novel, Mr. His righteousness is just too much for me to bear, even at Christmastime. His sweet creations - most of them angelic children - often curdled the page.Īnd let's face it: Tim Cratchit, with his feeble voice, withered little hand and chirpy "God Bless Us, Everyone," is like a sugar cookie coated in caramel and dunked in hot cocoa. ![]() ![]() Dickens was at his best when injecting his characters with darkness and wit. The same goes for The Old Curiosity Shop's Little Nell, Dombey and Son's small Paul Dombey and any other diminutive Dickens characters who unequivocally represent Goodness and Mercy with a straight face. ![]() As a die-hard fan of Charles Dickens, it pains me to admit this: I never liked Tiny Tim. ![]() ![]() ![]() Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a "third culture" that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide. ![]() They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. Now, as an atheist and a mechanical engineering student, this book challenged a lot of preconceived ideas I had about Islam. She settles in Cairo, where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. Willow Wilson I was required to read this as a text on Islam for my religion and literature class while taking my undergraduate degree. ![]() Willow Wilson - already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just 27 - leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future. The extraordinary story of an all-American girl's conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world. ![]() |