LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the essay “In- Betweens” by Diana Abu-Jaber.

The narrator moves to Jordan with her Jordanian father, American mother, and two younger sisters.

One night after my sisters and I are in bed and the baby cats have ceased their crying, my parents come to our room, whispering and nudging each other, their smiles sly, as if they shared a private joke. They shake us out of sleep and say, “C’mon, we’re going to do something!”

We yawn, slide out of the warm caves of our beds; our parents are gesturing us out the front door, their laughter lowered and mesmerizing. Then we are running across the stone courtyard—my sisters and I bare- footed in cotton pajamas, the stones waxy beneath our feet. The neighbors and the street are all asleep, the buildings shut up, rose-tinted under a brassy, round moon. In one corner of the courtyard, tilted under the staircase to the upper floors, is the scooter, its red gleam muted now, private and soft. For a moment I think of my grandmother back in New Jersey, who wears lipstick in the same fluid tones: red shot through with an undercurrent of blue. I look back at it as my parents open the car.

We drive through parts of the city that I’ve never seen before, where the lights glow like melted butter and the girls on the sidewalks are wearing brimmed hats and high heels. Men smile and turn to watch our car passing: I watch back, hands pressed to the window. Then we race beyond the glowing streets—they dwindle to a star—and the road ahead of us is long and dusty blue and smells like a warm, blue must, like the heat of a sheep’s back.\

When we finally get out of the car, there’s a gravel lot, an expanse of folding chairs, patios, sparkly restaurants wedged in a long crescent along a flat blackness like gleaming enamel. Dad holds his hand out toward the gleam. “And what did I promise you kids?” he asks, though I recall no promises related to anything like this. “It’s the Dead Sea!”

We’ve come, as usual, with no preparation, so my parents let us run into the water in our underpants—like the Jordanian kids around us. The salt water is satiny, so soft and dense it seems to bend beneath our arms. My father, who is generally afraid of the water, comes out and shows us how you can sit in the sea. He lazes back in it, and my sister tows him around by his hair while he makes boat sounds.

One of the restaurants on the lip of the water has a string of red lights that drop their reflections in the moonlit water; they make me think of the lonely red scooter. After a while, I struggle out of the water, yanking up my soggy underpants with their sprung elastic waistband. Mom is stretched out on a canvas chaise longue, holding a drink with a little parasol on the side. She wraps me shivering into a beach towel and makes room for me beside her in the lounge.

I blink out of my towel cave at this new place around us, then touch my mother’s ribs through her cotton shirt. “Mom, how long do you have to be best friends with someone if you’re best friends?”

She flutters at my bangs; they’re drying stiff with salt. “Well, honey, I don’t think there’s any rules about that. I guess you can be best friends with someone your whole life if you’re lucky.”

“Are you and Dad best friends?”

It’s hard to make out her expression under the cherry lights. She seems to be thinking about it, staring out to where

Dad is still drifting around, piping and tooting like a tugboat.

“You have to do whatever your best friend says, right?”

Now I can see her face—amused and wary. “Why do you say that?”

“Dad said to come to Jordan, right?”

There is even less sound now than before, if that is possible, just a slip of waves on the shore, a sighing wash like the sound of someone saying hush, hush, or the rustle of the palm fronds arching over the sand. “Your father . . . needed us to come here, he needed to see—what it felt like.

“What does it feel like?” I ask quietly, not quite knowing what I’m asking, just following the path of the questions.

“I don’t think—” she starts, then stops. My father is climbing out of the dark wash of the sea. “I don’t think it feels the way he remembers it.”

I put my hands on her waist—something that feels a little like a spark of alarm bounces through me. “Does he know that? That it doesn’t feel the same?”

She looks over her shoulder, my father’s shadow falling toward us in a long, cool slip as he walks beneath the neon lights. “He’s still finding out.”

The medicinal waters of the Dead Sea roll behind us, and the wild, heavy scent of honey, rocks, and thyme tempers the air. People come to dip themselves in these waters, to be cured of everything from skin ailments to spiritual wasting. I breathe it in deeply and sense a sort of dawning sweetness—of loss and nostalgia.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the article “The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious” by Sarah Yager.

In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, discovered a mutant seedling in his orchard of Yellow Bell- flower apple trees. He chopped it down, but the next season, it sprang back through the dirt. He chopped it down again. It sprang back again. “If thee must grow,” he told the intrepid sprout, “thee may.”

A decade later, Hiatt’s tree bore its first fruit. The apples were elongated globes with red-and-gold striped skin, crisp flesh, and a five-pointed calyx. In 1893, when Stark Brothers’ Nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a contest to find a replacement for the Ben Davis—then the most widely planted apple in the country, strapping and good-looking but bland—Hiatt sub- mitted his new variety, which he called the Hawkeye. “My, that’s delicious,” Clarence Stark, the company’s president, reportedly said after his first bite.

But not for the first time in apple lore, one sweet taste precipitated a fall. Stark Brothers’ soon secured the rights to the Hawkeye, changed its name to the Stark Delicious (only after the branding of the Golden Delicious, in 1914, did it become the Red Delicious), and began an ambitious marketing campaign. Over the next two decades, the nursery spent $750,000 to pro- mote the new apple, dispatching traveling salesmen to farms across the country and exhibiting the Delicious at the 1904 World’s Fair. After the completion of the Great Northern Railway, Clarence Stark sent trainloads of seedlings to newly established orchards in the Columbia River Valley, their leaves trembling as the engines rumbled West.

With its hardy rootstocks and juicy, curvaceous fruit, the Red Delicious quickly became a favorite of growers and consumers from coast to coast—and as its commercial success grew,   so did its distance from Hiatt’s Hawkeye. In 1923, a New Jersey orchardist wrote to the Starks to report that one limb of a tree he had purchased from the nursery was producing crimson apples while those on the other limbs remained green. A chance genetic mutation that made the apples redden earlier had also given them a deeper, more uniform color, and customers were lining up for a taste. Paul Stark, one of Clarence’s sons, traveled up from Missouri and laid down $6,000 for the limb. News of the deal spread, and soon The Gettysburg Times reported that more than 500 horticulturalists from 30 states had gathered at the orchard to discuss the “freak bud” that produced “the marvel apple of the age.” Their meeting marked the beginning of an era of fruit improvement, as growers began to seek out and cultivate similar mutations.

By the 1940s, the Red Delicious had become the country’s most popular apple, with the broad shoulders and lipstick shine of a Golden Age Hollywood star. The cosmetic changes were a boon for industrial agriculturalists: Apples that turned rosy before they were fully ripe could be picked earlier and stored longer, and skins with more red pigment tended to be thicker, which extended shelf life and hid bruises. But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. Still, by the 1980s, the Red Delicious made up 75 percent of the crop produced in Washington. By the time selective breeding had taken its toll, according to apple expert Tom Burford, a few big nurseries controlled the market, planting decisions were made from the removal of boardrooms, and consumers didn’t have many varieties to choose from. The Red Delicious became “the largest compost-maker in the country,” he said, as shoppers routinely bought the apples and threw them away.

Then in the 1990s, new varieties that American growers had originally developed for overseas markets began to edge into the domestic market. Shoppers had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths,” Burford said. And now their taste buds had been awakened. A sudden shift in consumer preferences, paired with growing competition from orchards in China, took the industry by surprise. Between 1997 and 2000, U.S. apple growers lost nearly $800 million in surplus crop. They had “made the apples redder and redder, and prettier and prettier, and they just about bred themselves out of existence,” a marketing director for one Northwestern fruit company told The New York Times.

Since then, Red Delicious production has declined by 40 percent. While the apple is still by far the most common in the U.S.—growers produced 54 million bushels of Red Delicious in 2011, compared to just 33 million bushels of its closest competitor, the Gala— the industry is adjusting to a changing market.

© 2014 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

HUMANITIES: This passage is from the article “Photography Changes the Movies We Choose to See” by Preminda Jacob.

For nearly five decades, huge photo-realistic billboards of film stars towered over the streets of Chennai, a major hub of the vibrant and prolific Indian film industry. Expertly hand-painted on canvas banners and plywood cutouts, these eye-catching advertisements extracted dreamlike images of wealth, beauty, and revenge from films screened in darkened and air- conditioned theaters and displayed them in the sunlit glare of urban thoroughfares.

The selection of these photographic stills, plucked from films and enlarged to architectural proportions (one hundred feet in length for banners and forty feet in height for cutouts) was calculated to excite the public and    nourish    a    “spectatorial    consciousness,”    what Roland Barthes, a French cultural critic who often wrote about photography, described as the experiential quality of still photographic images. Barthes recalled being transfixed by still images from movies, but then losing all memory of them while viewing the film they came from. Our perception of a moving cinematic image, he explained, is always determined by the frames that both precede and follow it. In contrast, a single and isolated film still that stands alone can be viewed indefinitely and more carefully.

While the artists who crafted Chennai’s cinematic billboards were probably unaware of Barthes’ theories, interviews I conducted with them reminded me how aware they were of distinctions between still and moving images. I recall one anecdote in particular. Mr. Vedachellam—a billboard artist and entrepreneur— explained to me that his film-industry clientele routinely attempted to circumvent censorship by protesting to the authorities that the provocative still photographs featured on billboards were simply taken from film footage already cleared by the censors. The police com- missioner’s canny rejoinder to the publicity agents’ appeals, Mr. Vedachellam recalled, was to remind them that these questionable stills appeared on the cinema screen for only a few seconds so viewers would soon forget them, or may not even have quite “seen” them at all. Freezing and enlarging such images, he argued, was a different matter altogether. And displaying them prominently on major thoroughfares would likely result in costly traffic jams and additional accidents. The police routinely censored these images by pasting pieces of white paper over offending portions of the billboards.

In his work, Barthes made another, different point about   distinctions   between   photographic   and   painted images. A photograph, he claimed, is indexical—it has a direct and detailed correspondence to the subject, whereas in a drawn or painted image, each mark or brushstroke potentially takes on more symbolic value. So, what happens when the conventions of three media coalesce? A photograph of Mr. Vedachellam at work records a complex nexus of photography, painting, and the cinema. Each medium mimics some of the characteristics of the two others. Vedachellam’s painting style is photorealistic; he copies a photograph that is, itself, a composite of film stills. These stills reflect the influence of the melodramatic look of nineteenth- century European tableaux painting on the sets, costumes, and lighting of the first full-length feature films produced both in Hollywood and in India.

The hybridization of these media dates back to the work of India’s earliest photographers. From the 1850s to the present, local entrepreneurs operating photo studios have employed painters to enhance portrait photographs   of   their   clients   with   drama   and   desirable accoutrements that were absent in the original photographs. The theatricality of Indian studio photo- graphs, and the fantasies they fulfill, has in turn influenced the idealized ways celebrities are represented in the hand-painted cinema advertisements. Like their counterparts in the world of studio photography, banner artists also painted directly onto a photograph in the process of creating studies for their spectacular enlargements. Using black-and-white poster paints, they first painstakingly outlined every detail in the photograph. Next, a photographic negative of the outlined image was projected onto the canvas or plywood surface and a tracing was made. At every stage in the process artists grasped a film still in one hand while wielding a paintbrush with the other hand.

This method of transferring photographic stills onto canvas encouraged artists to further manipulate and idealize images of their celebrity subjects.

NATURAL SCIENCE: Passage A is from the book Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell. Passage B is from the essay “Big Love: The Emotional Lives of Elephants” by Carl Safina.

Passage A by Virginia Morell 

One of the more striking discoveries in neuroscience in recent years is the finding that elephants, whales, great apes, and humans all possess a peculiar kind of brain cell. These neurons were first discovered in human brains in the nineteenth century and were named von Economo cells after the Romanian anatomist Constantin von Economo, who identified them. At first, these spindle-shaped neurons were touted as the cells that “make us human,” because they’re connected to our feelings of empathy, love, emotional suffering, and sociality. Then, in 1999, two other researchers, Patrick Hof and John Allman, spotted von Economo cells in the brains of all the great apes; others recently found them in monkeys. Allman has searched without luck for the cells in more than a hun- dred other species, from sloths to platypuses. So it was big news when, in 2007, he discovered spindle cells in the brains of whales, dolphins, and elephants. But it was a puzzling discovery, too. Why should such a dis- parate group of animals have these specialized cells?

From an evolutionary point of view, it’s not surprising that primates and humans have von Economo cells, since we are in the same lineage. But primates and humans haven’t shared an ancestor with whales or elephants since about the beginning of the mammalian lineage, some sixty million years ago. It seems that cetaceans and elephants evolved their spindle cells independently. What factors would produce such emotionally specialized brain cells?

Allman thinks part of the answer lies in the size of the animals’ brains—most species that have spindle cells also have notably large brains—and in the location of the cells. Von Economo cells are always found in two regions of the cortex associated with emotionally charged, visceral judgments, such as deciding whether a fellow animal is suffering. And part of the answer lies in the size of the spindle cells. They are unusually large, enabling them to act like high-speed circuits, fast-tracking information to and from other parts of the brain, while bypassing unnecessary connections. These are the kind of cells, Allman argues, that would be especially useful to an animal living in a complex society—a society in which making accurate, intuitive decisions about another’s actions (or facial or vocal expressions) is crucial for your family’s and your survival.

Passage B by Carl Safina 

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to animals, inanimate objects, or natural phenomena. 

In establishing the study of animal behavior as a science, it had originally been helpful to make anthropomorphism a word that raised a red flag. But as lesser intellects followed the Nobel Prize–winning pioneers, anthropomorphism became a pirate flag. If the word was hoisted, an attack was imminent. You wouldn’t get your work published. And in the academic realm of publish or perish, jobs were at stake. Even the most informed, insightful, logical inferences about other animals’ motivations, emotions, and awareness could wreck your professional prospects.

But what is a “human” emotion? When someone says you can’t attribute human emotions to animals, they forget the key leveling detail: humans are animals. Human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sensations, using inherited nervous systems.

All of the emotions we know of just happen to be emotions that humans feel. So, simply deciding that other animals can’t have any emotions that humans feel is a cheap way to get a monopoly on all of the world’s feelings and motivation. People who’ve systematically watched or known animals realize the absurdity of this. But many others still don’t. “The dilemma remains,” wrote author Caitrin Nicol recently, “how to get an accurate understanding of the animals’ nature and (if appropriate) emotions, without imposing on them assumptions born of a distinctly human understanding of the world.”

But tell me, what “distinctly human understanding- ing” hampers our understanding of other animals’ emotions? Is it our sense of pleasure, pain, hunger, frustration, self-preservation, defense, parental protection? We never seem to doubt that an animal acting hungry feels hungry. What reason is there to disbelieve that an elephant who seems happy is happy? We can’t really claim scientific objectivity when we recognize hunger and thirst when animals are eating and drinking, exhaustion when they tire, but deny them joy and happiness as they’re playing with their children and their families. Yet the science of animal behavior has long operated with that bias—and that’s unscientific. In science, the simplest interpretation of evidence is often the best.