Dwight Garner at the New York Times:
It’s not as if Thomas Pynchon has never written about cheese before. In his first novel, “V.” (1963), there’s an artist named Slab — he’s a “catatonic expressionist” — who obsessively paints cheese Danishes in various styles: Cubist, Fauvist, Surrealist, etc. In Pynchon’s second book, “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966), a woman named Oedipa Maas returns home from a Tupperware party suspecting her hostess had put “too much kirsch in the fondue.”
Little in Pynchon’s oeuvre, however, prepares the reader for “Shadow Ticket,” his first novel in 12 years and possibly (he is 88) his last. Alongside Émile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris,” it is perhaps Western literature’s Great Cheese Novel. (Though Pynchon often spells it “cheez.”) It’s as if he’s out to make America grate again.
Whereas Zola sang of Brie “like melancholy extinct moons” and compared a round of Gruyere to “a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot,” Pynchon finds in the industrial production of curds and whey enough paranoia, satirical and otherwise, to power a midsize city, perhaps one in Wisconsin.
more here.
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From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s hand came branches and whorls, spines and webs. Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the distinctiveness and diversity of the fundamental building blocks of the mammalian brain that we call neurons.
A little over fifty years ago, the philosopher 
Psychedelics were demonized, research was shut down, and mushrooms went underground. Their appeal lingered. I came of age at the end of the next decade, and while other drugs scared me, psilocybin always seemed like something that, someday, I might try. The prospect of a mystical state softened the sense of scary transgression, the warnings about nightmarish trips. Nibbling a magic mushroom sounded far more appealing than swallowing blotter paper soaked in acid.
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose within the collective. Sometimes those individual components are us — people interacting within societies or online communities. Studying the dynamics of such interactions is interesting both to better understand what is happening, and hopefully to designing better communities. I talk with Petter Törnberg about flows of information, how polarization develops, and how artificial agents can help steer things in better directions.
Duchamp did leave behind some gnomic quips—“Intrinsic value has a greater density than relative value” (I don’t know what that means)—and some crisp writing. In a poem about Crotti, she declared, “He believes in everything—accepts everything—denies everything—sells 60 cylinder cars—loses and wins—makes games and invents reasons for living.” Another intriguing fact: Her compatriots adored her. Writing under a pseudonym, Picabia declared, “Suzanne Duchamp does more intelligent things than paint.” There can be no higher praise from him.
While on paper an obvious insider, Raymond Geuss has for decades been criticizing contemporary philosophy as though he were an outsider, viewing it as an intellectually limiting practice too occupied with academically narrow, self-generated problems. He performs this critique with an eye to the past, returning often to canonical or more peripheral figures from the history not only of philosophy but adjacent fields such as literature and classics; accordingly, he aspires to occupy the position of the interdisciplinary critic and interpreter, highlighting exemplary achievements that inspire a more inclusive approach to philosophy.
Jane Goodall, a British primatologist known for her work with chimpanzees, died on Wednesday 1 October, aged 91. She was in California on a speaking tour and died of natural causes, according to the Jane Goodall Institute.
Born in Tamale and primarily raised in Accra, Mahama chose to base his art studio, Red Clay, in the provincial city rather than in the nation’s capital. Tamale, an important trading hub in northern Ghana, is known for its fugu clothing, a type of smock with roots in the Malian and Songhai empires. Over the centuries, Muslim traders built mosques and schools in sedate Tamale, which was more inland and distant from the direct links of the transatlantic slave and colonial trade. By contrast, Accra, the nation’s capital, with its Parliamentary Building and Black Star Square, is enlivened by streams of mellow banter and commerce. The city’s nocturnal activity creates an electric pulse. Pentecostal revival meeting lights and condominium-sale advertisements illuminate the city, leaving a ruddy glow along the highway. Although both Accra and Tamale have influenced Mahama’s work insofar as he draws from the capital’s marketplace and the provincial city’s scrap metal, his talent emerged against the broader backdrop of the postindependence promise of industrialization and its failure to deliver prosperity to most Ghanaians. Mahama’s installations, which say something about societal deterioration, also dramatize the country’s inability to sustain robust funding in the arts or technology in its postindependence years.
“The Days of Awe are coming.” Rather than a tagline for a Netflix series modeled on Game of Thrones, the phrase is the literal translation of Yamim Nora’im, or Jewish High Holidays. These awesome days begin with Rosh Hashanah on September 22 and reach a crescendo with Yom Kippur on October.
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Last week, OpenAI released a