Polish filmmaker Bartosz Konopka recounts the history of the Berlin Wall from the perspective of rabbits trapped in the no-man's land created by the structure. Freed from hunting pressure, they multiplied and prospered. After all, no one was shooting at them. Such structures, known to biologists as "exclosures," often belie their brutal genesis with an unintended beneficial impact on wildlife. After all, they exclude the most destructive of predators: people. The DMZ between North and South Korea is said to be teeming with otherwise endangered wild animals. Until the cleanup began last summer, the fenced-off Sydney Tar Ponds was...

27 March, 2010

The New York Times website offers a series of five interactive images today showing scenes along the Berlin Wall around 1989, and the same scenes today. The screen shot here, showing Ebertstrasse, a street that runs from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz, is static, but on the Times' site it shifts from before to after as you slide your cursor left and right. Contrarian reader Judy Haiven thinks it's time we turned out attention to another wall: The Berlin wall is down, but Israel's wall is up, and divides family from family, people from their work or school or from their...

07 November, 2009