The New York Times Magazine

Viagra has surely had many unintended consequences, but one of the strangest is the help it might bring to vulnerable animal species. Since the drug was introduced in 1998, the trade in some wild animal parts traditionally used in the creation of "impotence cures" has fallen drastically. And two researchers who have studied that trade in Canada and Alaska say they believe the link is no coincidence.

Sales of Alaskan reindeer antlers -- the velvet is used in traditional Chinese… more

Whenever a gun is fired, a unique set of microscopic markings are left on the bullets as they travel through the barrel. Bullet casings are similarly marked by the gun's "ejecton port." Why not use this information to help solve crimes? Entered into a national database, these ballistic "fingerprints" could be used to narrow the search for a weapon and its owner considerably. After all, it is far more common to recover bullets and casings at crime scenes than the… more

If you are the parent of an American child, then yfou may well have noticed how Japanese our kid culture has become. No set of images has dominated childish desires quite so handily over the last five years or so as the amalgams of cuteness and power in the Japanese-made cartoons (and their many product spinoffs): Pokemon, Digimon, DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon, Hamtaro and, most recently, Yu-Gi-Oh. It's enough to make Disney envious.

The spike-haired, doe-eyed girls and boys and… more

It happens nearly every time a new book comes out about motherhood and work -- the flurry of responses that treat reports of a still-unsolved conflict between the two as a revelation, even a shock. Last spring it was "Creating a Life," Sylvia Ann Hewlett's dour statistical inventory of a career gal's chances for procreating. This fall it's Allison Pearson's cannily amusing novel of working-mom manners, "I Don't Know How She Does It." Each book was greeted, as such books… more

When you work at a car dealership, you spend a lot of time standing around, but that does not mean you relax. How can you, with the manager constantly hovering over you and the strains of "We Will Rock You" or some other sales-meeting anthem ricocheting around your brain? You've got to be on, you've got to be pumped, you've got to be ready to pursue a car that noses into the lot, and then be standing right there, hand… more

I've always been fond of the movie "A Summer Place," one of those late-50's Technicolor melodramas that can barely contain the enormous and genuine emotions it evokes. Its subject is the dangers for teenagers of sexual repression, and the dangers for their parents of lying to them about it -- quite a radical subject when you think about it, though sometimes it's hard to with the made-for-Muzak theme song swelling on the soundtrack. Molly, played by the 17-year-old Sandra Dee,… more

Last fall, something peculiar began to happen at more than two dozen elementary and middle schools scattered across the country. Suddenly, groups of children started breaking out with itchy red rashes that seemed to fade away when the children went home -- and to pop up again when they returned to school. Frustratingly for the federal, state and county health officials who were working to explain this ailment, it did not conform to any known patterns of viral or bacterial… more

Today is Apologies Day in Rosalind Wiseman's class -- so, naturally, when class lets out, the girls are crying. Not all 12 of them, but a good half. They stand around in the corridor, snuffling quietly but persistently, interrogating one another. "Why didn't you apologize to me?" one girl demands. "Are you stressed right now?" says another. "I am so stressed." Inside the classroom, which is at the National Cathedral School, a private girls' school in Washington, Wiseman is locked… more

It took awhile to unlearn the number 6,000. Though the estimated death toll at the World Trade Center has been falling steadily since early October -- and has by now shrunk by half -- the smaller number proved hard to absorb. As late as Thanksgiving, the larger figure was still being cited by disc jockeys and pundits, by Northern Alliance fighters and admirers of Osama bin Laden. Maybe even now it remains embedded in the minds of Americans who have… more

Communal Bereavement

Anyone who has ever mourned the death of a loved one knows that grief can be a curiously somatic experience -- that the body can register sorrow as sensitively and as involuntarily as a seismograph, that sorrow can make you sick. Scientists have documented insomnia, depressed immune function, greater susceptibility to heart attacks and elevated levels of corticosteroids, the so-called stress hormones, in recently bereaved people. But a bereaved person is by definition someone who has lost an intimate.… more