Word: birth
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...fact is, the kids don't have to feel so pressured - and neither do their parents. It is true, as the marketers say, that a baby's brain is a fast-changing thing. Far from passively sponging up information, it is busy from birth laying complex webs of neurons that help it grow more sophisticated each day. It takes anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the part of the brain, for this initial explosion of connections to be made, after which many of them shut down and wither away, as the brain decides which it will keep...
...engine behind this early striving is, often, the parents, who are increasingly consumed by the idea that if they can't perfect their children, they must at least get them as close to that ideal as possible. And who can blame them? Birth rates, while short of baby-boom levels, are nonetheless robust, tightening the competition for spots in the best schools. At the same time, almost all those schools have democratized their admissions policies, meaning it's no longer just the ?lite who can attend. With competition getting ever keener, kids have to do ever more to distinguish themselves...
Since its birth, PSLM has never had an official hierarchy of officers or leaders. And in the past, the communal nature has worked well for the group-but the lack of a single voice has led to contention during their occupation of Mass. Hall...
...where Dragonball Z and Terminator movies have as much clout as provincial folklore. As in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and, more locally, the Nigerian novel Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Matapari’s childhood, from his “miraculous” birth in 1980 through the beginnings of Congo’s 1997 civil war, mirrors the nation’s own coming...
Perhaps the most miraculous thing about Little Boys Come from the Stars, however, is not the unlikely birth of its hero, but the birth of the novel itself. In 1997, civil war erupted in the Congo between the supporters of rival presidential candidates (derisively referred to in the novel as “Professor P-75,” the pseudo-scientist and “Tata Tollah,” the maniacal religious demagogue). The author, then a professor of chemistry at the University of Brazzaville in the Congo, rushed back to the Congo from a sojourn in Connecticut...