Benjamin Watson

My grandfather was born in 1920. His grandfather was born in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War, into an America where slavery had yet to be abolished. And so, as I have sometimes thought about it, I dodged slavery by just five generations.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

Ferguson and St. Louis County are not the first places that we have become engaged to ensure fair and equitable policing, and they will not be the last. The Department of Justice will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the Constitution has meaning for all communities.