Article 1

Music Playlists to Soothe Your Mind

Neuropsychiatrist Galina Mindlin suggests that listening to particular songs on your mp3 player can make you a more productive person

Along with co-authors Don DuRousseau and Joseph Cardillo, Galina Mindlin advise that repeated listening to selected songs can make you more productive, calmer or affectionate.

In their new book, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life, Galina Mindlin, director of the Brain Music Treatment Center, and co-authors Don DuRousseau and Joseph Cardillo advise that repeated listening to carefully selected songs on an iPod or other device can help train your mind and make you more productive, calmer or more affectionate. Mindlin spoke with Erica R. Hendry.

Who should be doing this?

I think playlists will benefit everybody, especially people who want to relieve their anxiety, sharpen memory, increase concentration, improve their mood or even relieve pain. Also, shift workers can use the playlist after a sleepless night to increase their alertness when they have to drive hom e, or to calm themselves down. We can actually enhance relationships to switch people from confrontational mode to understanding. For example, after a disagreem ent with his wife, one gentleman played their wedding song.

It instantly brought him into a more sympathetic mood.

How do you tap into that without formal therapy and figure out what works for you in different scenarios?

Its very important to choose something you already like and feel excited about. And then you have to play and replay the piece and learn that the piece makes you feel either calmer or more energized. Once you do that and tune into it, you see the effect on your mood and thinking in a matter of days or weeks.

How long does it take to put together a playlist thats actually effective? Where should people start?

It really depends, and, Ill add, we see this as fun. The brain usually likes things that are fun and are pleasurable. You can do this in your leisure time and we dont think its that long -- If you know your genre, you know you like electronic or classical music, it doesnt take that long, you just need to put it together. This is something that doesnt work instantly, you need to practice it and see what works and adjust accordingly.

The process you describe isnt really a passive exercise -- you even recommend using visualization, movement, scent with songs on your playlist. What do these elements do to your brain?

Its important to combine the musical stimuli with imagery because when you do you activate more areas in the brain. When youre feeling down you can recall a positive, exciting memory and connect that imagery with a strong, positive musical piece to energize your brain.

A lot of us fall into the habit of listening to the same songs over and over again. Can a playlist ever becomes less effective over time, or is this good for life, so to speak?

You have to update your playlist constantly, and you can really upgrade your list to stay current -- not using the most modern songs, which you could of course, but really checking in with what state of mind youre in right now. Because you can get even more stressed out in life, or you can go through a major life event, so you might need a more calming, stronger effect and then have to update your playlist.

Creativity tends to be one of those things we think were either born with or not, but in the book you argue its something you can enhance or learn with music with a technique called scaffolding.

If you use musical stimuli in brain training you increase the amount of neuroconnections in your brain. The more connections you have the sharper your brain is and the more creative you get.

What about someone who feels anxious?

For relieving anxiety, we recommend you choose a piece of music you really like that will calm you down and soothe you. You pay attention and ingrain that piece in your brain. Now you can use the piece any time you get stressed out.

A lot of us assume faster songs mean happy, slower songs mean calm or sad. Is that always true?

Not always. A fast song with a high beats per minute can calm you down. Thats something we use a lot with people with attention deficit disorder, children and adults. Its what we recommend to people who are striving for high concentration and focus.

There are a lot of musically challenged people out there

You dont have to be Rachmaninoff to do a playlist. Everyones brain knows what kind of music it likes, if it makes you calmer or more excited or less anxious.

You just replay the piece and practice listening to it. Research confirms that the practice actually makes the change in the brain, not musical talent or ability.

Article 2

Keeping it Weird in Austin, Texas

Aren't the residents of the proudly hip city of Austin, Texas, just traditionalists at heart? The rusted three-story hubcap- and bicycle-based Cathedral of Junk was created by Vince Hannemann, a South Austin guy who decided his backyard was as good a place as any to build a cathedral.

Hipsters of all stripes trek to Austin, Texas. By hipsters, I mean people who love irony but are suspicious of symbolism, who are laid-back without being lazy, who groom their music collections the way Wall Streeters monitor their stock portfolios, people whose relentlessly casual dress is constructed as painstakingly as stanzas in a pantoum.

Hippie or hipster, liberal or libertarian, salaried professional or hourly wageworker, people of all stripes here often refer to their work as their day jobs, rather than their careers. Youll find coffee shop baristas, retail shop clerks, bookstore cashiers as well as doctors, lawyers and computer programmers who view their real work as som ething else entirely music, art, an unpublished novel or collecting Popeye mugs.

My first time living in Austin felt more like a layover. I was teaching at the University of Texas and living in the leafy collegiate Hyde Park area, but I was in town only for the sem ester. I had a full teaching load and was the mother of two toddlers; I was on autopilot. Still, I dug the Austin parenting ethos: Kids cavorted on the outdoor play structures at Phils Icehouse or at Amys Ice Creams while parents watched from the sidelines, nursing bottles of Lone Star beer, comparing preschools and body piercings.

I was an instant fan of this brand of parenting, as it seemed an extension of Austins patio culture. Almost every restaurant, bar and music club has a patio annex as bigif not biggerthan its indoor space, since so much of Austin life is lived outsidepushing kids in a stroller, biking around town, or hiking to the coffee shop or watering hole. All of this is pleasant enough in March, April or May, but in summer, with 100-degree heat, its Survivor in flip-flops and a straw cowboy hat.

It was during this first grown-up foray in Austin that I became a breakfast taco fanatic, a complete surprise since the only breakfast tacos Id ever seen were in ads for Taco Bell, where the tortillas were filled with gray florets of ground beef that appeared to be doused in WD-40 and topped with Cheez Whiz. Real breakfast tacos are something else. Theres the migas taco with egg, cheese and fried tortilla chips; the tinga de pollo with chipotle tomato salsa; the enfrijolada with tortillas dipped in black bean sauce and topped with cilantro.

I loved that Austin had strong Chicano roots, was Southern, friendly and even neighborly: the perfect combination of Southern heart, Western spirit and Yankee intellect.

The citys unofficial motto is Keep Austin Weird. Its a clarion call for residents to support local businesses and everything indie, to say no to big corporations or whomever Austinites suspect of attempting to package their scruffy slacker-factor authenticity. Many other citiesPortland, Madison, Santa Cruz and Asheville, North Carolinahave promoted similar campaigns, but it all began in Austin with Red Wassenich, an Austin Community College librarian, who was frustrated that Austin had been moving away from its funkier roots.

Wassenichs 2007 book Keep Austin Weird is a tribute to personal expression, ranging from a mosquito collection to art cars (imagine vehicles decorated by Pippi Longstocking or Hulk Hogan). Then theres Austins yard art, which can be as simple as showing off a hundred or so of your best pink flamingos, cast-off statuary and upcycled furniture pieces on your front lawn, to more complex projects that give a sculptural middle finger to city ordinances. The rusted three-story hubcap- and bicycle-based Cathedral of Junk was created by Vince Hannemann, a South Austin guy who decided his backyard was as good a place as any to build a cathedral. Now the weird rallying cry has expanded to include food trailers where you can buy your hearts delightfrom plate-size doughnuts at Gourdoughs to paper-plated gourmet food at Odd Duck.

Though I could eat my way through Austin 365 days a year, most Austinites would say its music, not food, that fuels the city. You cant throw a cowboy boot without hitting a guitarist, music club or someone hawking playbills for an open-mike night. Austin is the self-styled Live Music Capital of the World, and thanks in part to University of Texas students, upand-coming alt-country, alt-rock, alt-blues musicians flock to venues like the Broken Spoke, the Mohawk or Antones. The Broken Spoke started out as a honky-tonk, and eventually you had [acts like] Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, says Texas native and UT English professor Michael Adams. It made being weird normal. Now, the once-tiny music conference and festival South by Southwest has become one of the countrys largest.

Texans tend to be traditionalists, and though Austinites might seem to head in the opposite direction, they can be just as traditional as anyone from Waco. Austins embrace of all things kitsch, camp and retro is little more than a way of preserving the old under a veneer of novelty. Thus the Popeye mugs and the red-rose tattoos with Mom in gothic lettering favored by fake sailors everywhere. Name an institution threatened with extinction and youll find Austinites of all ages and creeds intent on saving it.

But even Austinites cant hold onto the past forever. Austins 90s technological boom, spearheaded by Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers, is what brought me to Austin the second time around. I moved to Austin with my thenhusband when he got hired at the computer company. We promptly separated, and while my ex contemplated a move to the northern burbs, the kids and I settled in Austins largely African-American East Side, where the homes are modest, some so small theyd be garages in posh Hyde Park. You might even swear you were in Antigua or Trinidad: turquoise-blue and tangerine-orange bungalows predominate for a few blocks, centered around a community garden, guarded by towering eight-foot-high sunflowers. Black and Latino kids shimmy down the playground slides and pedal their bikes, knowing theyve got family on every block, whether related to them or not. I immediately fell in love with edgy

and bucolic East Austin, which has its own version of yard art: bottle trees, similar to those on the Gullah islands, and makeshift sculptures that seem half Yoruba-inspired, half homage to Parliament-Funkadelic.

Along with Austins new affluence came expansion of the monstrous I-35 and MoPac expressways that displaced many African-Americans. Yet East Austin black folk uphold traditions such as the Juneteeth Day parade, which commemorates the end of slavery in Texas, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

What makes Austin a cultural powerhouse are its Latino roots, Tex-Mex vibe and expressions of pachanga synonymous with fiesta but to the tenth power, as exemplified by Pachanga Fest, the premier Austin Latino music festival. Latinos make up more than 35 percent of Austins population. Dagoberto Gilb, an Austin essayist and novelist, says that Austin had a ways to go in terms of integration when he arrived from Los Angeles and El Paso 15 years ago: When I came here, it was like going to Sweden.

But if there is any city in Texas that strives to bridge divides, its Austin. East Austin and South Austin have undergone a renaissance that is half gentrification, half sustainable communities, with a strong locavore movement, community gardens and a new Mexican American Cultural Center.

When my mom comes to town, we eat at Hoovers, one of the few places youll find blacks and whites chowing down in equal numbers, or well head to a Cajun restaurant called Nubian Queen Lolas. Then theres El Chilito, where you can get Mexican Coca-Cola, paletas de crema (creamsicles) and tacos. Texas has an abundance of taco joints, but where else but Austin would my motherprobably the only 60-plus African-American vegetarian in all of Kentuckybe able to get a soy chorizo breakfast taco?

My visiting professorship at UT ended a while ago, and I now teach at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Yet I still live in Austin, commuting 1,700 miles a week for the privilege. And that seems fitting. Austin links worlds, whether its vegans who chain-smoke, twenty-somethings in cutoffs and flip-flops who eat pork belly sliders and do the two-step, or octogenarians who ride Harleys down South Congress.

I think the BBQ/vegan contradiction is the essence of Austin, local novelist Sarah Bird tells me when I mention my moms soy chorizo habit. We seem to have cherry-picked and claimed what we like about Texasdream big/fail big, dont judge, but do dance. Maybe, says Bird, hitting upon what may well be the perfect metaphor for the citys composite, amalgam ous nature, Austin is all about the soy chorizo.

Article 3

The Hoarding Instinct: Dispatches From My War on Stuff

Surveys say that nearly 73 percent of all Americans enter their houses via the garageeach of them staring straight ahead to avoid seeing the stuff piled up where the cars are supposed to go.

We have a rule in my house that for every box of stuff stashed in the attic, at least one must be removed. The reality is that it would take 6or maybe 27boxes to make a dent in the existing inventory. But this creates a conflict with another rule against adding to the local landfill. So, for a while, I was taking things out of the attic and, for the good of the earth, hiding them in closets and under beds.

Then my grown children sat me down and said, We love you, but... I know how interventions work. I put on a glum face and confessed, My name is Dad, and I am a hoarder. And with these words, I manfully enlisted in the War on Stuff.

We are all foot soldiers in this war, though mostly AWOL. Surveys say that 73 percent of all Americans enter their houses via the garageeach of them staring straight ahead to avoid seeing the stuff piled up where the cars are supposed to go. The other 27 percent never open the garage door, for fear of being crushed beneath what might come tumbling out.

Its mostly stuff we dont want. The treasures in my attic, for instance, include a lost Michelangelo. Unfortunately, thats the character name of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure my son misplaced when he was 8. Theres also a yearbook from a school that none of us attended and a photograph of a handsome Victorian family, who are either beloved ancestors or total strangers who happened to be in a pretty picture frame we once bought. Two barrels ostensibly contain precious family heirlooms. I suspect that, if ever opened, they will turn out like Al Capones vault and contain nothing more than vintage dust.

My opening salvo in the War on Stuff was not, in truth, all that manful: It was a covert mission to slip my college hookah in among the merchandise at the neighbors garage sale. Then I tried flinging excess dog toys over a hedge into a doggy-looking yard down the street (my dog is a hoarder, too). That went well, until I hit a small child in the head. Next I tried selling an old golf putter on eBay, but after seven days eagerly waiting for my little auction to flare up into a bidding war, I came away with $12.33.

Then I discovered a web service called Freecycle, and my life was transformed. Like eBay or Craigslist, Freecycle is a virtual marketplace for anything you want to get rid of, but all merchandise is free. This four-letter word seems to unleash an acquisitive madness in people who otherwise regard garage sale goods with delicately wrinkled noses. Suddenly strangers were hot-stepping up the driveway to haul away bags of orphaned electrical adapters, a half bag of kitty litter my cats had disdained and the mounted head of a deer (somewhat mangy).

At first, I experienced twinges of donors remorse, not because I wanted my stuff back, but because I felt guilty about having suckered some poor souls into taking it. But others clearly had no such qualms. One day my regular Freecycle email came in touting an offer of pachysandra plants, all you can dig. Another day it was Chicken innards & freezerburnt meat. And both offers found takers.

I soon came to accept that there is a hom e for every objectexcept for the construction paper Thanksgiving turkey I glued together in fourth grade, with the head on backward.

Im adding that to a new barrel of family heirlooms that I will give my children when they buy their first homes.

Article 4

The Way of the Wolverine

After all but disappearing, the mammals are again being sighted in Washington's Cascade Range

Considered a m ere scavenger that robbed traps and ransacked cabins, the wolverine has recently earned respect and scientific attention.

Seven biologists and I crunch through the snow in the Cascade Range about 100 miles northeast of Seattle. Puffs of steam shoot from our noses and mouths as we look for a trap just off the snow-buried highway. The trap is a three-foottall, six-foot-long box-like structure made of tree trunks and branches. Its lid is rigged to slam shut if an animal tugs on the bait inside. When we find it, the lid is open and the trap unoccupied, but on the ground are four large paw prints. We cluster around them.

Putative, possible or probable? someone asks.

Keith Aubry glances at the tracks. Putative, he says. At best. He says theyre probably from a dog.

We were hoping they had been made by a wolverine, one of the most elusive and least understood mammals in North America. Up to four feet long and 40 pounds, wolverines are the largest terrestrial members of the mustelid, or weasel, family. Wolverines thrive in the cold, and can sniff out carcasses through six feet of snow. They raise their kits in caves dug into snow, with chambers and tunnels leading dozens of feet away from the den. Their feet are outsize, like snowshoes, and they can walk 50 miles or more per day across steep, snowy terrain. And they can be awfully hard to find.

We shuffle back to the trail and head deeper into the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. There is a slight air of letdown among the field crew, but Aubry is hopeful. He nods to the high dusted peaks, the scatter of trees. This is wolverine country, he says.

Aubry, a biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, couldnt have m ade that claim just 20 years ago. Trapped for their fur, poisoned by bait meant for wolves or regarded as pests and shot on sight, wolverines all but disappeared from these mountains in the mid-1900s. Several were caught or seen in the eastern part of Washington over the decades, but biologists believed those animals were strays that had crossed over from Montana or southern Canada, where they are far more numerous. (Wolverines also live in the boreal forests and tundra of Europe and Asia.)

Then came a blurry photograph of a wolverine in north-central Washington in 1996, and a report of a young female hit by a car in 1997. In 1998, Scott Fitkin, of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and John Rohrer, of the

Forest Serviceboth are in todays wolverine scouting partyset up camera traps not far from where we are now and photographed several wolverines, suggesting the furtive creatures had returned.

Wolverines have always been mysterious and, to many people, menacing. Such was its gluttony, a Swedish naturalist wrote in 1562, that after coolly dispatching a moose, the wolverine would squeeze itself between closely growing trees to empty its stomach and make room for more food. The popular 19th-century book Riverside Natural History called it an inveterate thief that ransacked cabins and stole bait from trap lines set for fur animals. Even as recently as 1979, the wolverine was, to a Colorado newspaper, something out of a nightmarish fairy tale.

These days, Aubry calls it powerful, fearless and indomitable. Like all mustelids, it is carnivorous; it preys on a variety of animals, from small rodents to the occasional snow-bound moose. But primarily it scavenges, at least in winter, digging into the snow to unearth carcasses and biting into frozen meat and bone with its powerful jaws. It lives eight to ten years in the wild and up to 17 in captivity. But elem ents of its basic biology and behavior are still unknown, in part because of its forbidding habitats.

After a jarring snowmobile ride and a slog down a slope of softer, deeper snow, we reach one of the remote camera stations that Rohrer has scattered throughout a 2,500-square-mile study area. This one is in a small copse of evergreens. A deer head hangs from a cable and is oddly mesmerizing as it twists in the breeze. Beneath it, a wooden pole juts from a tree trunk. The idea is that a wolverine will be drawn to the fragrant carrion and climb out on the pole. But the bait will be just out of reach, and so the wolverine will jump. A motion-sensitive camera lashed to a nearby tree will photograph the wolverine and, with luck, document the buff markings on its throat and chest, which Aubry uses to identify individuals.

Thats the plan, at any rate.

Mostly we get martens, Rohrer says of the wolverines smaller cousin.

To see whether the wolverine really had re-established itself in the Pacific Northwest, Aubry, Rohrer and Fitkin laid three traps in 2006 and baited them with roadkill.

We werent expecting much, Aubry says. We thought wed be lucky if we caught even one wolverine.

They caught two: a female, which they named Melanie, and a male, Rocky. Both were fitted with satellite collars and sent on their way. But Melanies collar fell off and Rockys was collected when he was recaptured a few months later. The second year, the crew collared three wolverines: Chewbacca (or Chewie, so named because he nearly gnawed his way through the traps wooden walls before the field crew could get to him), Xena and Melanie (again). The third year, they caught Rocky twice, and the fourth year they caught a new female, Sasha.

Data detailing the animals locations trickled in, and by March 2009 Aubry had an idea of the ranges for several wolverines. They were huge: Rocky covered more than 440 square miles, which sounds impressive until compared with Melanie, who covered 560 square miles. Both crossed into Canada. Yet their recorded travels were dwarfed by those of Chewie (730 square miles) and Xena (760 square miles)among the largest ranges of wolverines reported in North America. More important, though, was that Aubry suspected Rocky and Melanie might be mates, and perhaps Chewie and Xena, too, given how closely their ranges overlapped. A mated pair could indicate a more stableand potentially increasingpopulation.

Working with colleagues in the United States, Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Aubry confirm ed that the key to wolverine territory was snowmore precisely, snow cover that lasted into May. Every single reproductive den in North America, as well as about 90 percent of all wolverine activity in general, was in sites with long-lasting snow cover.

Scientists working in the Rocky Mountains then found that snow cover even explained the genetic relationships am ong wolverine populations. Wolverines interbreed along routes that go through long-lasting snow.

We have a better sense of what they need, where they like to live, Aubry says now of the wolverines in the North Cascades. But no one can say with any certainty how many we have here.

He points to a string of tracks running along the side of the road. That 1-2-1 pattern, thats classic mustelid. And look how big they are.

We gather around. These tracks are the only sign well see of the wolverine, but for Aubry thats how things usually go. Most of our contact is like this, he says. Very indirect.

Cathy Raley, a Forest Service biologist who collaborates with Aubry, carefully carves one footprint from the snow with a big yellow shovel and holds it out, like a cast. Aubry guesses the tracks are probably two or three days old, judging by their crumbling edges and the light dusting of snow on top of them. Its worth knowing where the tracks gomaybe t o find some hair or scat, something that could be analyzed to determine if they were made by a previously identified anim al. So we follow them, looking after them as far as we can, as they wend across the soft relief of the hillside, until they disappear into the broken forest.

Article 5

Evolution World Tour: Jurassic Coast, England

The best opportunity to play paleontologist is on the southern coast of England, a site rich with marine reptile fossils

The Jurassic Coast encompasses 185 million years of history.

Just down the shore from where children build sand castles and parents relax beneath brightly colored umbrellas, fossil hunters chip away, hoping to uncover a piece of Englands prehistoric past. They come to this section of the southern coast not only in summer, but also in winter, when heavy rains beat against the cliffs, washing away clay and revealing bones dating back hundreds of millions of years.

Its incredibly easy to walk along the coast and find something no one has ever seen before, says Paul Barrett, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

The Jurassic Coast, as this region is known, stretches for almost 100 miles and encompasses 185 million years of earths history. At the far west end, in Exmouth, the cliffs date to the Middle Triassic, some 240 million years ago. There, fossilized sand dunes and river channels conceal bones of early amphibians and land reptiles. On the eastern end, the Isle of Purbeck yields a jumbled mix of remnants from the Early Cretaceous period, 140 million years agoeverything from mollusks and crustaceans to dinosaurs and mammals.

The area in between is home to one of the most complete sequences of Jurassic rocks ever found, spanning nearly the entire period, 200 million to 145 million years ago. Its one of the richest places for looking at marine reptiles, Barrett says. Over the centuries, the site has given scientists a peek into a lost undersea world populated by dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs and coiled mollusks called ammonites. Important land dwellers were found here as wellnotably an early armored dinosaur called Scelidosaurus, an ancestral relative of stegosaurs and ankylosaurs.

Many of the rocks along the Jurassic Coast are stacked in neat layers, which enabled scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries to map them and study the geologic processes that formed them. At that time, the prevalent belief was that God had created the earth a mere 6,000 years before and that the planet had rem ained essentially unchanged since the time of Noah and the great flood. But the rocks along these English shores added to the growing pile of geologic evidence that, in contrast to the biblical interpretations of the planets origin, the earth was hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years old. (Scientists later determined that our planet is, in fact, 4.6 billion years old.)

And the fossils entombed within the rocks led to an even more startling conclusion: that creatures could become extinct. A key piece of this prehistory was dug out of the cliff near Lyme Regis in 1811-12 by 12-year-old Mary Anning, who

would grow up to become one of the m ost accomplished fossil hunters of her time. The 17-foot-long creature she discovered had a skull like a porpoise, teeth like a crocodile and a backbone like a fish. Charles Konig of the British Museum, which bought the find, named it Ichthyosaurus (the fish-lizard).

For decades, naturalists had assumed that fossils, such as mastodon bones, were the remains of species that still thrived som ewhere on earth. But that presumption began to change with the discovery of ever-more exotic creatures. A decade after finding Ichthyosaurus, Anning discovered another odd anim al, with the head of a turtle and a neck nearly as long as its body. This Plesiosaurus was so unlike any modern creature that scientists had to conclude that extinction was possible. It was a frightening concept that contradicted the idea that the world was exactly as God had created it in the book of Genesis. But it was also an important idea to grasp because, before Charles Darwin could make the case for natural selection, scientists first had to realize that plants and animals could disappear forever.

Paleontologists still come to the Jurassic Coast to obtain specimens, but amateurs are even more common. Everyone is free to collect fossils from loose rocks on the beach, where they would otherwise be destroyed through erosion, says Chris Andrew, who helps lead fossil walks for the Lyme Regis Museum, which is located on the Jurassic Coast at the juncture of Dorset and Devon. If you think your beach find is interesting, you can take it to a heritage center. If it turns out to be scientifically important, the center will register it, and the fossils finder retains ownership. Digging into the cliffside is legal also, but only with permission from a local heritage center.

Anyone wishing to take this adventure back in time should come prepared, wearing suitable boots and protective gear. Tides can trap collectors on the beach, rockfalls are not uncommon and green algae can turn the rocks slippery. (Even expert fossil hunter Mary Anning was not immune to the dangersan 1833 landslide killed her pet terrier.) Professionally led fossil walks can provide a good orientation, and researching the site before a hunt can save wasted hours scouring the beach.

When its time to take a break from prehistory and return to the present, the Jurassic Coast, a popular holiday spot, has other offerings, Barrett says. The scenery is nice and you can get really good fish and chips right next to the sea.

Article 6

An Eye for Genius: The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein

It's easy to see the value of a Picasso painting now. But would you have bought one in 1905, before the artist was known? These siblings did.

Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso courted the Steins by doing portraits of them. Pictured are Gertrude, left, and Leo, center, by Picasso and sister-in-law Sarah by Matisse.

With its acid colors and slapdash brush strokes, the painting still jolts the eye. The face, blotched in mauve and yellow, is highlighted with thick lines of lime green; the background is a rough patchwork of pastel tints. And the hat! With its high blue brim and round protuberances of pink, lavender and green, the hat is a phosphorescent landscape by itself, improbably perched on the head of a haughty wom an whose downturned mouth and bored eyes seem to be expressing disdain at your astonishment.

If the picture startles even after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisses Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. One outraged critic ridiculed the room at the Grand Palais in Paris, where it reigned alongside the violently hued canvases of like-minded painters, as the lair of fauves, or wild anim als. The insult, eventually losing its sting, stuck to the group, which also included Andr Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Fauves were the most controversial artists in Paris, and of all their paintings, Woman with a Hat was the most notorious.

So when the picture was later hung in the Parisian apartment of Leo and Gertrude Stein, a brother and sister from California, it made their home a destination. The artists wanted to keep seeing that picture, and the Steins opened it up to anyone who wanted to see it, says Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which organized The Steins Collect, an exhibition of many pieces the Steins held. The exhibition goes on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from February 28 to June 3. (An unrelated exhibition, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, about her life and work, remains at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery until January 22.)

When Leo Stein first saw Woman with a Hat, he thought it the nastiest smear of paint he had ever encountered. But for five weeks, he and Gertrude went to the Grand Palais repeatedly to look at it, and then succumbed, paying Matisse 500 francs, the equivalent then of about $100. The purchase helped establish them as serious collectors of avant-garde art, and it did still more for Matisse, who had yet to find generous patrons and desperately needed the money. Over the next few years, he would come to rely for financial and moral support on Gertrude and Leo, and even more on their brother Michael and his wife, Sarah. And it was at the Steins that Matisse first came face to face with Pablo Picasso. The two would embark on one of the most fruitful rivalries in art history.

For a few years the California Steins formed, improbably enough, the most important incubator for the Parisian avantgarde. Leo led the way. The fourth of five surviving children born to a German Jewish family that had relocated from Baltimore to Pittsburgh and eventually to the San Francisco Bay area, he was a precocious intellectual and, in childhood, the inseparable companion of his younger sister, Gertrude. When Leo enrolled at Harvard in 1892, she followed him, taking courses at the Harvard Annex, which later became Radcliffe. When he went to the World Exposition in Paris in the summer of 1900, she accompanied him. Leo, then 28, liked Europe so much that he stayed, residing first in Florence and then moving to Paris in 1903. Gertrude, two years younger, visited him in Paris that fall and did not look back.

By then Leo had already abandoned his ideas of taking up law, history, philosophy and biology. In Florence he had befriended the eminent art historian Bernard Berenson and resolved to become an art historian, but he scrapped that ambition, too. As James R. Mellow observed in the 1974 book Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, Leo led a life of perennial self-analysis in the pursuit of self-esteem. Dining in Paris with the cellist Pablo Casals in 1903, Leo decided he would be an artist. He returned to his hotel that night, lit a blaze in the fireplace, stripped off his clothes and sketched himself nude by the flickering light. Thanks to his uncle, the sculptor Ephraim Keyser, who had just rented a place of his own in Paris, Leo found 27 rue de Fleurus, a two-story residence with an adjoining studio, on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens. Gertrude soon joined him there.

The source of the Steins incom e was back in California, where their eldest sibling, Michael, had shrewdly managed the business he inherited upon the death of their father in 1891: San Francisco rental properties and streetcar lines. (The two middle children, Simon and Bertha, perhaps lacking the Stein genius, fail to figure much in the family chronicles.) Reports of life in Paris tantalized Michael. In January 1904, he resigned his post as division superintendent of the Market Street Railway in San Francisco so that, with Sarah and their 8-year-old son, Allan, he could join his two younger siblings on the Left Bank. Michael and Sarah took a years lease on an apartment a few blocks from Gertrude and Leo. But when the lease was up, they could not bring themselves to return to California. Instead, they rented another apartment close by, on the third floor of a former Protestant church on the rue Madam e. They would stay in France for 30 years.

All four of the Paris-based Steins (including Sarah, a Stein by marriage) were natural collectors. Leo pioneered the path, frequenting the galleries and the conservative Paris Salon. He was dissatisfied. He felt he was more on track when he visited the first Autumn Salon in October 1903it was a reaction to the Paris Salons traditionalismreturning many times with Gertrude. He later recounted that he looked again and again at every single picture, just as a botanist might at the flora of an unknown land. Still, he was confused by the abundance of art. Consulting Berenson for advice, he set off to investigate the paintings of Paul Czanne at Ambroise Vollards gallery.

The place looked like a junk shop. Although Vollard was resistant to selling pictures to buyers he didnt know, Leo coaxed an early Czanne landscape out of him. When brother Michael informed Gertrude and Leo that an unexpected

windfall of $1,600, or 8,000 francs, was due to them, they knew what to do. They would buy art at Vollards. Established first-rate artists like Daumier, Delacroix and Manet were so expensive that the budding collectors could only afford minor pictures by them. But they were able to buy six small paintings: two each by Czanne, Renoir and Gauguin. A few months later, Leo and Gertrude returned to Vollards and purchased Madame Czanne with a Fan, for 8,000 francs. In two months, they had spent som e $3,200 (equivalent to about $80,000 today): Never again would they lavish so much so fast on art. Vollard would often say approvingly that the Steins were his only clients who collected paintings not because they were rich, but despite the fact that they werent.

Leo comprehended Czannes importance very early, and spoke eloquently about it. Leo Stein began to talk, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz later recalled. I quickly realized I had never heard more beautiful English nor anything clearer. Corresponding with a friend late in 1905, Leo wrote that Czanne had succeeded in rendering mass with a vital intensity that is unparalleled in the whole history of painting. Whatever Czannes subject matter, Leo continued, there is always this remorseless intensity, this endless unending gripping of the form, the unceasing effort to force it to reveal its absolute self-existing quality of mass....Every canvas is a battlefield and victory an unattainable ideal.

But Czanne was too expensive to collect, so the Steins sought out emerging artists. In 1905, Leo stumbled upon Picassos work, which was being exhibited at group shows, including one staged in a furniture store. He bought a large gouache (opaque watercolor) by the then obscure 24-year-old artist, The Acrobat Family, later attributed to his Rose Period. Next he purchased a Picasso oil, Girl with a Basket of Flowers, even though Gertrude found it repellent. When he told her at dinner he had bought the picture, she threw down her silverware. Now youve spoiled my appetite, she declared. Her opinion changed. Years later, she would turn down what Leo characterized as an absurd sum from a would-be buyer of Girl with a Basket of Flowers.

At the same time, Leo and Gertrude were warming to Matisses harder-to-digest compositions. When the two bought Woman with a Hat at the 1905 Autumn Salon in the Grand Palais, they became the only collectors who had acquired works by both Picasso and Matisse. Between 1905 and 1907, said Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, [Leo] was possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-century painting in the world.

Picasso recognized that the Steins could be useful, and he began to cultivate them. He produced flattering gouache portraits of Leo, with an expression that was earnest and profoundly thoughtful, and of a sensitive young Allan. With his companion, Fernande Olivier, he dined at the rue de Fleurus flat. Gertrude later wrote that when she reached for a roll on the table, Picasso beat her to it, exclaiming, This piece of bread is mine. She burst out laughing, and Picasso, sheepishly acknowledging that the gesture betrayed his poverty, smiled back. It sealed their friendship. But Fernande said that Picasso had been so impressed by Gertrudes m assive head and body he wanted to paint her even before he knew her.

Like Czannes Madame Czanne with a Fan and Matisses Woman with a Hat, his Portrait of Gertrude Stein represented the subject seated in a chair and looking down at the viewer. Picasso was jousting directly with his rivals. Gertrude was delighted by the outcome, writing some years later that for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me. When people told Picasso that Gertrude didnt resemble her portrait, he would reply, She will.

It was probably the fall of 1906 when Picasso and Matisse met at the Steins. Gertrude said they exchanged paintings, each choosing the others weakest effort. They would see each other at the Saturday evening salons initiated by Gertrude and Leo on the rue de Fleurus and the Michael Steins on the rue Madame. These organized viewings came about because Gertrude, who used the studio for her writing, resented unscheduled interruptions. In Gertrudes flat, the pictures were tiered three or four high, above heavy wooden Renaissance-era furniture from Florence. The illumination was gaslight; electric lighting didnt replace it until a year or so before the outbreak of World War I. Still, the curious flocked to the Steins. Picasso called them virginal, explaining: They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans. He took many of his artist friends there, including Braque and Derain, and the poet Apollinaire. By 1908, Sarah reported, the crowds were so pressing that it was impossible to hold a conversation without being overheard.

In 1907 Leo and Gertrude acquired Matisses Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, which depicts a reclining woman with her left arm crooked above her head, in a garden setting of bold crosshatchings. The picture, and other Matisses the Steins picked up, hit a competitive nerve in Picasso; in his aggressive Les Demoiselles dAvignon (an artistic breakthrough, which went unsold for some years) and the related Nude with Drapery, he mimicked the womans gesture in Blue Nude, and he extended the crosshatchings, which Matisse had confined to the background, to cover the figures. The masklike face of Gertrude in Picassos earlier portrait proved to be a transition to the faces in these pictures, which derived from bold, geometric African masks. According to Matisse, Picasso became smitten with African sculpture after Matisse, on his way to the Steins, picked up a small African head in an antiques shop and, upon arriving, showed it to Picasso, who was astonished by it.

Music was one of the last Matisses that Gertrude and Leo bought, in 1907. Beginning in 1906, however, Michael and Sarah collected Matisses work primarily. Only a world-class catastrophethe earthquake in San Francisco on April 18, 1906slowed them down. They returned home with three paintings and a drawing by Matissehis first works seen in the United States. Happily, the Steins discovered little damage to their holdings and returned to Paris in mid-November to resume collecting, trading three paintings by other artists for six Matisses. Michael and Sarah were his most fervent buyers until the Moscow industrialist Sergei Shchukin saw their collection on a visit to Paris in December 1907. Within a year, he was Matisses chief patron.

Gertrudes love of art informed her work as a writer. In a 1934 lecture, she remarked that a Czanne painting always was what it looked like the very essence of an oil painting because everything was always there, really there. She built

up her own sentences by using words in the deliberate, repetitive, blocky way in which Czanne employed small planes of color to render mass on a two-dimensional canvas.

The 1909 publication of Three Lives, a collection of stories, marked Gertrudes first literary success. The following year, Alice B. Toklas, who, like Gertrude, came from a middle-class Jewish family in San Francisco, moved into the rue de Fleurus apartment and became Gertrudes lifelong companion. Leo, possibly chafing at his sisters literary success, later wrote that Toklas arrival eased his imminent rupture with Gertrude, as it enabled the thing to happen without any explosion.

Gertrudes artistic choices grew bolder. As Picasso staked out increasingly adventurous territory, many of his patrons grumbled and refused to follow. Leo, for one, derided Demoiselles as a horrible mess. But Gertrude applauded the landscapes that Picasso painted in Horta de Ebro, Spain, in the summer of 1909, which marked a crucial stage in his transition from Czannes Post-Impressionism into the new territory of Cubism. Over the next few years, his Analytical Cubist still lifes, which fragmented the picture into visual shards, alienated people still more. Picasso deeply appreciated Gertrudes purchase of some of these difficult paintings. The first work she bought without Leo was The Architects Table, a somber-colored, oval Analytical Cubist painting of 1912 that contains, amid the images of things one might find on such a table, a few messages: one, the boldly lettered Ma Jolie, or My Pretty One, refers covertly to Picassos new love, Eva Gouel, for whom he would soon leave Fernande Olivier; and another, less prominent, is Gertrudes calling card, which she had left one day at his studio. Later that year she bought two more Cubist still lifes.

At the same time, Gertrude was losing interest in Matisse. Picasso, she said, was the only one in painting who saw the twentieth century with his eyes and saw its reality and consequently his struggle was terrifying. She felt a particular kinship with him because she was engaged in the same struggle in literature. They were geniuses together. A split with Leo, who loathed Gertrudes writing, was unavoidable. It came in 1913, he wrote to a friend, because it was of course a serious thing for her that I cant abide her stuff and think it abominable....To this has been added my utter refusal to accept the later phases of Picasso with whose tendency Gertrude has so closely allied herself. But Leo, too, was disenchanted with Matisse. The living painter he most admired was Renoir, whom he considered unsurpassed as a colorist.

When brother and sister parted ways, the prickly question was the division of spoils. Leo wrote to Gertrude that he would insist with happy cheerfulness that you make as clean a sweep of the Picassos as I have of the Renoirs. True to his word, when he departed in April 1914 for his villa on a hillside outside Florence, he left behind all his Picassos except for some cartoonlike sketches that the artist had made of him. He also relinquished almost every Matisse. He took 16 Renoirs. Indeed, before departing he sold several pictures so that he could buy Renoirs florid Cup of Chocolate, a painting from about 1912, depicting an overripe, underdressed young woman sitting at a table languidly stirring her cocoa. Suggesting how far he had strayed from the avant-garde, he deemed the painting the quintessence of pictorial art. But he remained loyal to Czanne, who had died less than a decade earlier. He insisted on keeping Czannes

small but beautiful painting of five apples, which held a unique importance to me that nothing can replace. It broke Gertrudes heart to give it up. Picasso painted a watercolor of a single apple and gave it to her and Alice as a Christmas present.

The outbreak of hostilities between Gertrude and Leo coincided with aggression on a global scale. World War I had painful personal consequences for Sarah and Michael, who, at Matisses request, had lent 19 of his paintings to an exhibition at Fritz Gurlitts gallery in Berlin in July 1914. The paintings were impounded when war was declared a month later. Sarah referred to the loss as the tragedy of her life. Matisse, who naturally felt terrible about the turn of events, painted portraits of Michael and Sarah, which they treasured. (It is not clear if he sold or gave the paintings to them.) And they continued to buy Matisse paintings, although never in the volume that they could afford earlier. When Gertrude needed money to go with Alice to Spain during the war, she sold Woman with a Hatthe painting that more or less started it allto her brother and sister-in-law for $4,000. Sarah and Michaels friendship with Matisse endured. When they moved back to California in 1935, three years before Michaels death, Matisse wrote to Sarah: True friends are so rare that it is painful to see them move away. The Matisse paintings they took with them to America would inspire a new generation of artists, notably Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell. The Matisses that Motherwell saw as a student on a visit to Sarahs hom e went through me like an arrow, Motherwell would say, and from that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

With a few bumps along the way, Gertrude maintained her friendship with Picasso, and she continued to collect art until her death, at age 72, in 1946. However, the rise in Picassos prices after World War I led her to younger artists: among them, Juan Gris, Andr Masson, Francis Picabia and Sir Francis Rose. (At her death, Stein owned nearly 100 Rose paintings.) Except for Gris, whom she adored and who died young, Gertrude never claimed that her new infatuations played in the same league as her earlier discoveries. In 1932 she proclaimed that painting now after its great period has come back to be a minor art.

She sacrificed major works to pay living expenses. As Jewish Americans in World War II, she and Alice retreated to the relative obscurity of a French farmhouse. They took only two paintings with them: Picassos portrait of Gertrude and Czannes portrait of his wife. Once the Czanne disappeared, Gertrude said in response to a visitors query about it, We are eating the Czanne. Similarly, after Gertrudes death, Alice sold some of the pictures that had been hidden away in Paris during the war; she needed the money to subsidize the publication of some of Gertrudes more opaque writings. In Alices last years, she became embroiled in an ugly dispute with Roubina Stein, the widow of Allan, Gertrudes nephew and the co-beneficiary of her estate. Returning one summer to Paris from a sojourn in Italy, Alice found that Roubina had stripped the apartment of its art. The pictures are gone permanently, Alice reported to a friend. My dim sight could not see them now. Happily a vivid memory does.

Leo never lost the collecting bug. But to hold on to his villa in Settignano, where he lived with his wife, Nina, and t o afford their winters in Paris, he, too, had to sell most of the paintings he owned, including all the Renoirs. But in the

1920s and 30s, he began buying again. The object of his renewed interest was even stranger than Gertrudes: a forgettable Czech artist, Othon Coubine, who painted in a backward-looking Impressionist style.

Only once, not long after the end of World War I, Gertrude thought she glimpsed Leo in Paris, as she and Alice drove by in their Ford. He took off his hat and she bowed in response, but she didnt stop. In the more than 30 years between his acrimonious departure and her death, brother and sister never spoke again.

Article 7

The Doomed South Pole Voyage's Remaining Photographs

A 1912 photograph proves explorer Captain Robert Scott reached the South Polebut wasn't the first

It is splendid to have people who refuse to recognise difficulties, British Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote early in the expedition to the South Pole. But they would after they set out from the pole.

Great God! British Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal on January 17, 1912, the day he reached the South Pole. He was not exultant. This is an awful place, he went on, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

For more than two months, Scott and his men had hauled their supply sledges across 800 miles of ice from their base camp at Antarcticas McMurdo Sound, hoping to become the first people to reach the pole. But the photograph at left, taken by Lt. Henry Bowers the same day, makes clear the reason for Scotts despair: The Norwegian flag flying above the tent had been left by the explorer Roald Amundsen, whose party had arrived five weeks earlier. Inside the tent, Scotts men found a letter Amundsen had written to Haakon VII, king of Norway, along with a note asking Scott to deliver it for him.

Even if you dont know what came next, Bowers photograph conveys a sense of failure. The men show no arm-in-arm camaraderie. Their faces are weather-beaten. No supplies are visible. In fact, Scott and the four men he brought with him on the last 150-mile dash to the pole were running low on food and fuel. (Bowers had been added at the last minute, dangerously stretching their rations.) Their return trip would become one of the most dismal failures in the annals of polar exploration.

In the late Antarctic summer, the men encountered unusually cold temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and blizzards kept them tent-bound for days on end. Petty Officer Edgar Evans died on February 17, probably from a head injury sustained in a fall into a crevasse. As resources ran low, Capt. Lawrence Oates famously sacrificed himself: Crippled by frostbite, he left the partys tent during a March 16 snowstorm with the words, I am just going outside and may be some time.

The following November, a search party came upon Scotts last camp, a mere 11 miles from a cache of supplies. Inside a tent were the bodies of Scott, Bowers and Edward A. Wilson, the expeditions chief scientist. Scotts journals were there too, with the last entry dated March 29, along with 35 pounds of geological specimens carried at great cost and Bowers undeveloped film. David M. Wilson, a descendant of Edward Wilson and author of the recently published The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott, says Bowers pictures proved that both Scott and Amundsen had reached the pole.

Bowers straightforward work contrasts with that of Herbert Ponting, the photojournalist Scott had hired to document his expedition. Ponting had traveled extensively in Asia and sold his work to prominent London magazines, and the Scott assignment made him the first professional photographer to work in the Antarctic. The image on this page shows Pontings artistry: It captures the textures of ice, water and cloud in a perfectly balanced composition, with Scotts ship, Terra Nova, in the background. Scott described the scene in terms that suggest his own sensitivity to art and nature: It was really a sort of crevasse in a tilted berg parallel to the original surface....Through the larger entrance could be seen, also partly through icicles, the ship, the Western Mountains, and a lilac sky.

Ponting did not accompany Scott to the poleamong other things, his equipment was considered too heavy. As planned, he left Antarctica for England in February 1912, while Scott and his men were still struggling to make it home. At first, the news of Scotts fate overshadowed Pontings pictures, but after World War I the photographer published his work, to great acclaim, in a book titled The Great White South. All subsequent Antarctic photography, Wilson wrote to me in an e-mail, is a footnote to his pioneering work.

Taken together, the two images reflect the two poles of Scotts expedition; despite the tragedy, the words and images Scott and his men left behind became a lasting legacy to science and art. As Scott noted in his final diary entry, these rough notes and our dead bodies would tell his tale. Amundsen planted the flag, but it was Scott who captured our imagination.

Article 8

Wild Things: Killer Whales, Spiders and Woodpeckers

Yellow saddle goatfish, mastodon ribs and more in this months summary of wildlife news Pack Hunters

Lions, orcas, hyenas, some hawks and a few other species hunt collaboratively, and now researchers have added a fish to that list. Yellow saddle goatfish in the Red Sea often congregate. And when one fish starts accelerating toward a prey fish, its associates join the hunt. These blockers spread out over the reef to cut off the preys escape routes, giving the group of goatfish a better chance at making a successful catch. The behavior was observed by researchers from the University of Neuchtel in Switzerland. Other species of goatfish eat only invertebrates, while the yellow saddle variety chases mainly other fish. The researchers suggest that collaborative hunting may have evolved in this species to allow the goatfish to exploit a faster and more nimble source of food. Pecking Mystery Solved

How can a woodpecker repeatedly bang its head into a tree at 15 miles per hour without harming itself? Researchers from Beihang University in Beijing and elsewhere, using high-speed video, microscopic scanning and 3-D models, found that spongy spots in the skull, along with tissues of different sizes in the upper and lower beak, are crucial for absorbing shock. The work might be useful for designing helmets and other safety gear. Early American

Near the end of the last ice age, a group of hunters in Washington State bagged a mastodon. A new Texas A&M University-led study of a mastodon ribwith a projectile point still embedded in itshows that the animal lived 13,800 years ago. Its some of the oldest evidence of hunting in the New World, and more evidence that humans arrived well before the Clovis people, once thought to be the first Americans. Caught In A Lie

In nursery web spiders, a male gives a potential mate an insect wrapped in silk. When a sneaky guy wraps up a fake offering, such as an inedible seed, a female will begin to copulate. But once she detects the deception, she will terminate mating early for worthless gifts, says Maria Albo of Aarhus University in Denmark. Observed: Killer whale Orcinus orca

Lives:

In

the

Antarctic

(a

population

known

as

type

B),

feeding

on

seals

and

penguins.

Beelines: Occasionally for the subtropical waters off Uruguay and Brazil, a study documents for the first time. But the trips are so quick theyre probably not for foraging or giving birth. Instead, the trips may be the equivalent of a vacation skin peel.

Returns: Without the coating of algae that tinges its skin yellow. John Durban of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, and his co-author suggest the orcas travel to milder latitudes when they shed their skin to help the whales regenerate skin tissue in a warmer environment with less heat loss, he says.