Frankenstein's Monster

The misery of not being seen and recognized for who we are makes us blindly grope in the dark sometimes. Despite being lost in a confusing forest full of her family's hovering shadows, Eleonora Zanetti will manage to get back to the main road and see some light. Frankenstein's monsters are shaped by those who create them, but they will eventually go beyond their creators' intentions. Eleonora's story tells of the struggle to find purpose and harmony in her student identity, through a gruesome betrayal of those who created a monster composed of other people's dead parts

Spandrel or Frankenstein\u27s Monster? The Vices and Virtues of Retrofitting in American Law

Ancient mythology, literary fiction, and modern science fiction films all recount a similar cautionary tale: human ingenuity gives rise to a powerful invention, but through human fallibility and, in some tellings, venality, the invention becomes a monster and turns on its creators. Perhaps the most famous example is Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein, in which Dr. Frankenstein\u27s attempt to fashion a living man from the dead remains of others succeeds, only then to go horribly awry. Such stories are timeless because they warn of the dangers of indelible features of human nature: hubris and short-sightedness. Recent large-scale catastrophes such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill and the 2011 tsunami-induced radiation leakage at the Fukushima nuclear power facility are only the latest reminders of the limits of human ingenuity and the continuing relevance of the Frankenstein story. But if the unintended consequences of human ingenuity can sometimes prove disastrous, at other times, they may turn out to be felicitous. We are all familiar with accidental inventions like penicillin, Post-it Notes, and the microwave oven. Spandrels are a more whimsical example. A spandrel is the space between a curved arch and a rectangular boundary; although an artifact of architecture and geometry, since ancient times, artists and architects have used spandrels to enhance the beauty of buildings. We see a similar process in nature: evolution, or in the case of human culture, our own artifice, retrofits organs and capacities that were originally selected for one purpose to serve some very different purpose. Feathers evolved as insulation but proved useful for flight. Evolutionary biologists debate the causal origins of sophisticated human language, but it certainly did not evolve to enable the writing of sonnets or the delivery of lectures on law. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould popularized the term “exaptation” to refer to this phenomenon, expressly analogizing it to spandrels in architecture. So much for literature, science, and art. Let me turn now to something about which I am more qualified to express an opinion: law. The law contains numerous examples of retrofitting. Legal institutions, doctrines, and texts that were originally thought to serve one purpose can come to serve quite different purposes

[Review of] Sabine R. Ulibarri. El Condor and Other Stories

This volume continues in the same vein as Governor Glu Glu, but Ulibarri here delves even more deeply into the world of fantasy. Many of the eleven stories in El Condor are like sugar-coated medicine: the sweetness prepares the reader for the lesson which comes in the form of a moral at the end. The Man Who Didn\u27t Eat, for example, is a tale of the scientific creation of a man who is vegetable Frankenstein\u27s monster, with parts taken from many plants. The creature in Ulibarri\u27s story is benevolent; as a result of his superhuman effort to save his neighbors from a plague to which he is immune, he misses his nutritional injection and dies. Ulibarri concludes with his lesson: No one ever knew, neither in the lay world nor in the scientific world, that a living miracle had lived among us. We do not know how to recognize the miracles that surround us. In A Man Who Forgot, the author presents a self-conscious story about a man who remembers only what is good. The moral here is, how beautiful life would be if we could erase from our memory all that is ugly, and remember only the beautiful and the good