Featured Article from Lady DaVinci's Salon:

Through the Looking Glass:  Mirror Neurons and Moral Nonsense
When people fail to develop sufficient empathy, they become miscreants, criminals, and in extreme cases, psychopaths. Neuroscience now suggests that high-quality relationships in childhood affect the empathy centers of the brain. Is it possible to use this knowledge to reduce the far-too-prevalent instances of man’s inhumanity to man?

Image: Darfur refugee Sam Ouandja. Courtesy the Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team in the Central African Republic (HDTPCAR).

Featured Online Book, Fiction:

Les Miserables, (Victor Hugo)

This famous and well-loved novel follows a set of characters who face tremendous life struggles and whose lives intersect at critical junctures. Their interactions as they either show compassion or withhold it from one another become Hugo's platform for insightful social commentary and for his heart-wrenching examination of humanity's use of good and evil, justice and mercy, selfishness and compassion.

The 1980 musical by the same name (composed by Claude-Michel Schönberg with a libretto by Alain Boublil) has been translated into 21 languages and has played in 38 countries around the world.

Featured Online Text, Nonfiction:

Mass Graves and Other Atrocities in Bosnia
Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe: One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, December 6, 1995.

This collection of eyewitness statements and personal accounts documents, in the words of Commission Chairman Christopher H. Smith, "the atrocities against children, agaisnt women, and against men. . . . The role [of documentation] is vital, in and of itself. We owe it to the victims, and it is our hope that the attention given to the violations in Bosnia may deter future violations."