Kathryn Shulz at The New Yorker:
Consider that sandstone, which began, some two billion years ago, as quartz crystals buried deep inside mountains towering over what is now the Upper Midwest and southern Canada. Time took apart the mountains, and rain dissolved most of the minerals in them, but the quartz remained. It was later washed into Precambrian rivers and eventually carried to a beach, where its grains were worn smooth and spherical by the waves. That beach was tropical, partly because the contemporaneous climate was extremely warm, but also because Wisconsin, at the time, was near the equator. As the sea retreated and other rocks and minerals were deposited on top of the former strand, the grains of quartz hardened into sandstone, which was gradually sculpted by wind, water, and glacier until, aboveground, it formed the topography of Wisconsin as we know it today. Belowground, it formed an excellent aquifer, thanks to those spherical grains, which—“like marbles in a jar,” as Bjornerud puts it—leave plenty of room for storing water in between them.
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I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or Korea resonating within it. Asia is a region with an extensive history of a totally different sort from the West. Like in Africa, I guess, we inherit a thick layer of profound time in our basal memory that shapes our physical and mental subconscious gestures, and we always have to remember that.
Broadly speaking, plankton fall into two big categories – the plant-like phytoplankton and the animal-like zooplankton – though quite a few species have characteristics of both. Cyanobacteria and other microbial, ocean-dwelling phytoplankton are Earth’s original photosynthesizers. About half of all photosynthesis on the planet today occurs within their cells.
We all know the trope: a machine grows so intelligent that its apparent consciousness becomes indistinguishable from our own, and then it surpasses us – and possibly even turns against us. As investment pours into efforts to make such technology – so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a reality, how scared of such scenarios should we be?
MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richard Sieburth as Frail Riffs,rather than the more straightforward “faint noise”—is now finally available in English. This memoir project spans the years 1948 to 1976, which is roughly the middle of Leiris’s writing career. There were, in fact, memoirs published before and after this project, and a massive set of journals (only available in French as of now) that stretch across his life from young adulthood right up to death. Taken in sum, almost all of Leiris’s writings qualify as what he called “essais autobiographiques.”
A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 
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Why did the nurse need a red crayon?
Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf Wife of Bath, who rides astride in bright red stockings; the Canon alchemist, so sweaty from the ride that his horse is a lather of suds; the “ful vicious” Pardoner with his jar of dubious holy “pigges bones”; and the garlic-loving Summoner, with a face so pimply “children were aferd”—Chaucer knew them all. As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard (Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess (1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.”
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Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, 
Scientists generally consider it uncool to anthropomorphize, but as a nonscientist, I can say that if lithium were a friend, it would be the sort of friend who is humble and unassuming and yet also seemingly everywhere all at once doing really fabulous and important things. Lithium, in my imagination, is the envy of the other elements.
Breaking a fast carries more health benefits than the 
A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.