Silk, during its self assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter.

For a country, opening up is like coming out of the cocoon and becoming a butterfly. There will be pain, but there will be new life.

So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material.

And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things.

I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was.

But even when people do not work together, globalization, by bringing the world to everyone s living room (or hut), enables them to make much wider comparisons of their living standards. It erodes the relative security in which the rich world could shelter itself, as in a cocoon.

Likewise, while Fox can be criticized for not clamping down on protesters and a disruptive, extremist opposition, he never resorted to the bloody repression for which most of his predecessors came to be known. Moreover, he dragged Mexico out of its archaic foreign policy cocoon, and placed immigration and human rights at the heart of Mexico s new international agenda.