FYI: Findings

A study of Pakistanis has found STRONGER SUPPORT FOR MILITANT GROUPS among the middle class than among the poor, challenging conventional wisdom. The research team, which included Princeton graduate student Graeme Blair and politics professor Jacob Shapiro, analyzed surveys from 6,000 Pakistani adults. The researchers’ conclusion that the poor in Pakistan were substantially more negative toward militant groups undercuts the assumptions of American policies that have focused on using aid to reduce poverty as a way to combat militant violence. The results were published in July by the American Journal of Political Science.

The arrival of rock fragments from distant planets — as well as microorganisms along for the ride — may have introduced LIFE ON EARTH. A team that includes visiting researchers Edward Belbruno and Amaya Moro-Martin suggests that planetary fragments have escaped one system’s gravitational pull and drifted through space until pulled into another planetary system, where they might have collided with a planet like Earth. The research was published in Astrobiology in September. 

So clichéd is the lumbering figure of FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER, we forget the 1818 novel by Mary ­Woll­stonecraft Shelley that hatched the myth. In “The Annotated Frankenstein” (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), English professor Susan Wolfson and a colleague at Rutgers, Ronald Levao, find the novel brimming with allusions to “Paradise Lost” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as well as to Shelley’s own tumultuous life.