Recently the New York Times featured an article in their Sunday magazine on Kristin and Tatiana Hogan, four-year-old twins who are conjoined at the cranium and share a neural bridge. I read it with fascination, but what lingers still is the striking picture of two smiling, joyous children surrounded by a loving family. As a physician remarked in a recent post on the Arizona Bioethics Network, “you can just hear them laughing.”

As it happened, the story of the conjoined twins appeared right around the time as the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing during the 1990s war in Bosnia. This news also captured my attention, for it was during the later 1990s when I was a volunteer at a literacy center that I came to mentor and befriend Sakib F., a Bosnian Muslim whose wife had been killed by the Serbs and who had escaped to America with his two teenage daughters.

Get The Drift to put the Hogan twins, Ratko Mladic and a country song by Lyle Lovett all together.