On the one
side, there's Moggie the Mass Murderer, which sees cats as directly responsible for the extinction
of many species
of mammal,
bird and reptile (63, according to a recent PNAS
paper).
In a
paper published in today's issue
of Science, they present evidence that when the Isthmus
of Tehuantepec in Mexico dried out, it split up dozens
of bird populations that now live
on either
side of the dry area.
Joan assessed the crowd, lighting upon the most interesting: young men turning white T - shirts into art, pinching the material tight and rubber - banding each section until they looked like porcupines being dipped into huge steaming vats
of colored dyes; the young woman with a
bird's nest
of purple hair sitting at a potter's wheel, slamming down hunks
of clay, her hands moving nearly as fast as the wheel, cups, vases, plates, bowls, trays, appearing like magic; the elderly man in a worn blue linen suit, a jaunty straw boater
on his head, a smeared palette tight in his hand, painting a mammoth canvas
of people
on a beach staring out at an ocean where a sailboat bobbed in the distance, though he himself was standing in a mowed field; the handsome young man at an old - fashioned school desk, a manual typewriter in front
of him, a stack
of paper to the
side.