So I’m in bed last night, reading a little bit (as is customary) before shutting out the light. I finish one article and move to the next. The title of this new article is “Sleeping with the Enemy”; and the subtitle, “What happened between the Netherlands and us?”
The Netherlands? I wonder. An enemy? Are we having problems with the Dutch which I have somehow overlooked?
So I start to read the article. It opens like this:
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, is a large, mostly glass building shaped a bit like a banana. The institute sits at the southern edge of the city, in a neighborhood that still very much bears the stamp of its East German past.
Suddenly the needle in my reading mind jumps the groove: squwrawk! I think to myself, Wait, why does this start out by telling me about a building in the former East Germany? Then I back up to the very first words and add: …and what the hell, an institute for evolutionary anthropology?!? What’s that got to do with geopolitics?
Then I back up even further, to the New Yorker‘s category heading: annals of evolution, it says.
So that solves the mystery of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But now I’m even more confused. Did we evolve from the Dutch? Say what—?!?
