Word: tree
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Flash: Audra McDonald sings standards! In the hotly awaited follow-up to her debut CD, Way Back to Paradise, Broadway's most adventurous singer offers a shrewdly mixed bill of old favorites (The Man That Got Away) and postmodern show tunes (Come Down from the Tree). Her silver voice is smoky yet refined, her diction clear as a cold mountain stream. Best of all is a passionately sung medley of Leonard Bernstein's Somewhere and Adam Guettel's How Glory Goes (from Floyd Collins), which she turns into a haunting declaration of doubt-flecked faith...
...blame a six-year-old who has criminals as role models for his faulty moral compass? Good question. But will it be so much easier to blame him for being morally defective at 16, after another 10 years in that environment? As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined. ("A young child is even more open to cultural and family influence than an older kid," a psychologist told the New York Times. True. But older kids were once young--that is, when they got the firm dispositions, for good or ill, that later resisted social influence...
...Dutchman eventually tracked down his marmosets to a black-water branch of the Amazon, 200 miles southeast of Manaus. A farmer pointed toward the edge of the forest, where five marmosets happily snacked on the resin of a morototo tree. On later visits, Van Roosmalen noticed that the soil of this farm was 3 1/2 ft. deep and richer than any he knew of in the Amazon, where the earth is sandy and gives out after a couple of years, forcing farmers to raze hundreds of square miles of rain forest every year...
Intrigued, he found other patches of this black earth elsewhere in the Amazon. Mixed into this loamish soil was evidence of prehistoric man: charcoal, occasional stone axheads made from meteorites, and a lump of manioc bread preserved in natural tree gum. "If we can find out how these so-called primitives made this soil," reckons Van Roosmalen, "we can use it as an alternative to destructive slash-and-burn agriculture." Unfortunately, since the river tribes that knew the secret were all wiped out by European raiding parties 500 years ago, the scientist must start from scratch...
Inside the rain forest, Van Roosmalen is an ethereal presence with his long, silvery-blond hair. He ghosts through the foliage, hardly stirring a leaf. There's the sudden drum of raindrops shaken off a tree high in the canopy, and Van Roosmalen trains his binoculars upward. A branch bounces, and out pops a Titi monkey with black, globed eyes and a pewter-colored beard. "It's a new species we just identified recently," he says excitedly...