Literary purists, of course, might question the wisdom of having kids develop as creative writers in this nontraditional way. But while there is certainly value in writing about one's own experiences, adolescents often have difficulty stepping outside themselves and seeing the world through other people?s eyes. Their closeness to Harry and his friends makes it possible to get some critical distance from their own lives and think through their concerns from a new perspective. And writing about Harry offers them something else, too: an audience with a built-in interest in the stories?an interest that would be difficult to match with stories involving original fictional characters. The power of popular culture to command attention is being harnessed at a grassroots level to find a readership for these emerging storytellers.

Using genetic information from samples of the 1918 virus recovered from frozen corpses buried in the Arctic tundra and preserved tissue samples kept in a hospital, the scientists reconstructed the viral protein that caused a strain of bird flu to infect human cells.

September 2003: Don't you wonder why practically every house built in America after World War Two is a design abortion? The answer is actually simple but a little abstruse: ugliness is entropy made visible.

When you live in a high entropy society, as we do, the entropy manifests in many ways: toxic waste, poor air quality, social alienation, epidemic obesity, odious popular culture, AND immersive ugliness.