Plus
he had five older brothers and sisters and a criminal-defense attorney for a father, acquired a degree in political science, read Milton Friedman, listened to Reagan's speeches and Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and did a stint as a door-to-door salesman for a gutter-cleaning service, where he learned to make his…

But
the amazing and profound thing — the thing that happened and didn't — was this: For the first time since 1961, six years before the riots, Cory Booker's city went forty-three days without a murder.

The
hostages noticed an incongruity: The black veil worn by one shahidka framed the neatly sculpted eyebrows of what seemed a teenager who had recently visited a beauty salon.

She's currently training to play an undernourished ballerina in a new Darren Aronofsky movie (she reportedly has a love scene with Natalie Portman), and she's been restricted to a diet of leafy greens and oatmeal.

For
centuries, parents beleived their primary obligation to their children was to keep them from the fires of hell; short of that, any amount of corporal punishment was justified.

Now, as the first decade comes to a close, there has been a small cottage industry - and one big, festering bag of pus of a feature film - concerning the so-called Long Count calendar of the Mayans, which purports to call for a general collapse of things on December 21, 2012, which is said to be the end of a…

Scavenging
help wherever he could and sweetening the deal with surfing lessons, he hired an outside firm to do the 3-D modeling and got a twenty-year-old engineering intern to redesign the reactor vessel in a year of eighty-hour weeks.

But consider this: A 16th century Poruguese trading vessel, carrying a fortune in gold and ivory and bound for a famed spice port on the coast of India, is blown far off course by a fierce storm while trying to round the southern tip of Africa.

Mattingly's
investigations bring him to the Ubari Sand Sea, where there are, improbably, many tiny, gem-colored lakes - some purple, some orange from minerals and algae - that are the dried-up reminders of a previous time when groundwater lay closer to the surface than it does today.

Ki Demit's clients sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him, a creaky ceiling fan above, the room crammed with candles and perfume bottles and prayer beads and antique knives.

Named
for a Norwegian whaling entrepreneur nearly a century ago, Bryde's (pronounced BROO-duhz) are baleen whales, which use meshlike mouth plates to filter food from the sea.

Days later, battered and broken, the ship founders on a mysterious, fogbound cost sprinkled with more than a hundred million carats of diamonds, a cruel mockery of the sailors dreams of riches.

Redwoods
the size of Saturn rockets sprouted from the ground like giant beanstalks, their butts blackened by fire.

Rames had spent $20,000 a month on special camel food, and it showed.

It is 9 p.m. and as dark as a witch's mummy, but in the cone of light cast by my headlamp, parts of trees seem to be unfixing themselves and wandering at will.

The ear can discern the slam of wood shutters, heels tapping up and down the stone steps of bridges, the abbreviated drama of whispered conversations, waves kicked against the seawall by boats, the staccato of rain on canvas awnings, and always, always, the heavy, sad sound of bells.

The odds
of a full, caldera-forming eruption - a cataclysm that could kill untold thousands of people and plunge the Earth into a volcanic winter - are anyone's guess; it could happen in our lifetimes, or 100,000 years or more from now, or perhaps never.

Angel has proposed launching trillions of two-foot-wide, thinner-than-Kleenex disks of silicon nitride-each disk an autonomous robot weighing less than a gram - into space between Earth and the sun, where they could deflect sunlight.

In
plainer words: Since the likelihood of any fish surviving the whole journey not just once but twice is so slim, Pacific salmon exhaust themselves fatally - they breed themselves to death - at the first opportunity they get.

He charted four bright satellites as they bustled around Jupiter like planets in a miniature solar system, something the critics of the Copernican sun-centered cosmology had dismissed as physically impossible.