from Jan 21, 2001

Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth is an astounding example of practical theology. In Paul's straightforward, almost serial address of everyday issues within the Corinthian church, he presents some of the most stirring claims about the nature of Christian community ever made.

In one chapter he demands the expulsion of an unrepentant man within the community who is sleeping with h ... Read commentary (you must be logged in to read the commentary)

Some [Asperger's children] grow up to be functional human beings. Others struggle throughout adulthood, finding intimacy impossible and common milestones unattainable. The Washington Post reported (August 7, 2000) the story of a young man with an IQ of 146 and an SAT score of 1,320 who had studied Advanced Placement statistics and three years of Latin but was nevertheless rejected by the colleges he applied to his senior year of high school. His social and organizational skills were abysmal and inconsistent with collegiate life because he has Asperger's - a disease first discovered by an Austrian pediatrician by the same name in 1944.

Estimated number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, according to the American Institute of Physics: 10 to the 64th.

Estimated number that can dance in a row across a pinhead's diameter, "Rockettes-style": 10 to the 32nd.


-Harper's Index 2000,
Harper's Magazine, January 2000, 13.

Consider Glenn Gould. The eccentric Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at age 31, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: he had a phobia about shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and arrowroot biscuits and rocked incessantly at the keyboard. At the same time, Gould's obsessive focus and prodigious memory helped give his legendary renderings of Bach their burning intensity. Might Gould have been an Asperger's sufferer? Timothy Maloney, a musicologist who manages the Gould archives, suggested precisely that at a recent academic conference.

Other scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label to oddball intellectuals ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Bela Bartok to Ludwig Wittgenstein.


-Lawrence Osborne, "The little professor
syndrome," The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2000, 56.

Friends have never been stimulating or entertaining enough for me. When I was younger, I lived in a make-believe world that was heavily layered. I was usually watching myself and my activities through a third party. Not unlike a camera watching an actor pretending to be in someone else's life. I was very inflexible and needed to do things my way. It was too difficult to explain to friends what I was doing and I was never interested in doing things the way they wanted to. I had a great imagination - maybe too good. I was always busy in some elaborate fantasy - so it was difficult to break out of that and play with dolls or some other type of role-playing with other kids.

I remember one afternoon, I was in my room building a house for my Barbie dolls. I didn't play with the dolls, but I loved building them houses. I would use cardboard, a bread knife and scotch tape and be totally consumed for weeks on end. We had bought a new washer and dryer and I got the boxes. I had built a 2-story house with an elevator that was moved by string pulleys. I needed lights inside the house so I was contemplating running electricity. I had taken my bedroom lamp, removed the shade, and put it in the living room of my new house. The house was so large, that I thought it would be neat to make the elevators move horizontally as well as vertically. As I was working out the logistics of what I would need to do to make the elevator go sideways from room to room, I smelled something burning. It was my leg. I was sitting Indian-style and my knee was resting on the light bulb. I had 21 blisters on my third-degree burn. I went back to my room and finished my house. I never got the elevators to work how I wanted them, but it was a great house anyway. I hated it when they were finished. No other house was going to be this much fun to build.

Today, I still prefer to work on my computer or with electronics rather than socialize.


-A woman's first-person account
of life with Asperger's Syndrome,
www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger.

Ten of the World's Shortest Books:
10. Everything Men Know About Women
9. Everything Women Know About Men
8. French Hospitality
7. George Foreman's Big Book of Baby Names
6. "How to Sustain a Musical Career" by Art Garfunkel
5. Mike Tyson's Guide to Dating Etiquette
4. One Hundred and One Spotted Owl Recipes by the EPA
3. Staple Your Way to Success
2. The Amish Phone Directory
1. The Engineer's Guide to Fashion


-R. Kwon, "World's shortest books," September 9, 1999, jokes@eurweb.com.