Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:
If you live in the United States, chances are you’re familiar with the game rock-paper-scissors. You put out your hand in one of three gestures: clenching it in a fist (rock), holding it out flat (paper) or holding up two fingers in a “V” (scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock.
Americans by no means have a monopoly on the game. People play it around the world in many variations, and under many names. In Japan, where the game has existed for thousands of years, it’s known as janken. In Indonesia, it’s known as earwig-man-elephant: The elephant kills the man, the man kills the earwig and the earwig crawls up through the elephant’s trunk and eats its brain.
The game is so common that it exists beyond our own species. Over millions of years, animals have evolved their own version of rock-paper-scissors. For them, winning the game means passing down their genes to future generations. A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reveals the hidden biology that makes the game possible — and shows how it may be an important source of nature’s diversity.
More here.
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Over the weekend, the United States bombed Venezuela, and 
“I can’t believe you haven’t read this,” my husband said one day right before Thanksgiving. He was holding Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “
Our society faces a dramatic, but elusive, crisis.
And here we arrive at a whole knot of issues at the heart of both Aviv’s and my own earlier characterizations of Oliver’s story. Because Oliver could relate to the situation of those wretched patients both out of the residue of his mother’s malediction itself and the sheer extent of the drug induced extravagances and catatonias he’d thenceforth experienced as its direct result during his ensuing wild California days (when his slogan had been “Every dose an overdose”), and beyond that, the wider identification he’d come to feel more generally with what his California-era friend, the psychoanalyst Bob Rodman, termed “communities of the refused” (an identification which would subsequently extend to Parkinsonians, Touretters, amnesiacs, the Deaf, the catatonic, the colorblind, the faceblind, and other such marginalized communities, and for that matter ferns and cuttlefish and even certain inert chemical elements as well). That sense of identification came to ground a profound empathy which, on the one hand helped him to give voice to the otherwise voiceless by helping them to reclaim their own stories, their own narratives, in so doing allowing them to reemerge as the active agents of their own lives—a practice which, granted, occasionally overstepped its bounds into outright projection and, in the subsequent recounting, downright confabulation.
When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, and when they turned their attention back to him, they found the infant’s mouth full of golden sweetness. Cicero provides our first surviving record of the legend, which is repeated with variations over centuries, always as a portent of the sweet style the infant would ultimately possess.
“Heated Rivalry” has become a breakout hit. The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals. If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical.
In an unremarkable New York apartment, sometime in the not-too-distant future, a man tells his robot to come to bed. She is a “Stella,” an intelligent machine who looks and sounds like a woman. We soon learn that she is a “Cuddle Bunny,” a euphemistic term for the sex-robot setting she’s currently running. She is also set to “autodidactic” mode, which gives her a searching intellect and a nascent independence. Her name is Annie, and we will follow her on the journey to elevated consciousness in “Annie Bot,” Sierra Greer’s slyly profound debut novel.
If you want to lose weight, exercise doesn’t really matter.
In a way I’ve never experienced in my life, I feel in synch with a political turn, felt by millions of voters, that’s now being reflected in the voice of one of the most dynamic leaders we’ve seen in a long time.
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information would be useful to him throughout his career. Loveman argues that the diary became his ‘catch-all’ for anything he couldn’t safely or conveniently note in his official or household accounts. Into its pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.