William Eggington in The New York Times:
Riding my bike recently through Baltimore’s swampy summer heat, I pulled up sharply to avoid running over a yard-and-a-half-long eastern rat snake slowly making her way across the hot asphalt. I picked her up and placed her at the root of the nearest tree, which she quickly scaled until she reached a branch at more or less the height of my head. Perched there, with her body draped around the tree trunk, she cocked her head forward in a classic snaky pose, and stared at me with what I took to be a look of astonished relief.
I tell this story not to try to show that I’m brave. I like snakes and can recognize the few venomous species in the region. My point is, rather, to raise a question that Christine Webb explores in her excellent new book, “The Arrogant Ape.” When I had my moment with that rat snake: Was it all in my mind? Or was there something actually going on in her mind, too?
More here.
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Sometimes it feels as if the tacos have been rubbed out of my tongue. For four years, I’ve been speaking a language that doesn’t belong to me, one that exists only through synonyms that are foreign to me. I’ve been living in the US for four years. The problem is not English — though I sometimes mistake a conjugation — but my own native language. My Spanish has not worsened, but it definitely has changed. My mexicanisms appear with lesser and lesser frequency in my daily speech. When I’m teaching Spanish and my undergrad students ask me the word for short, I have to fight my own instinct. I no longer say chaparro but pequeño. No longer cuate but amigo. No longer my Spanish but Spanish 101.
There were many excellent science books among this year’s entries, but 
The two technologies often get lumped together, which is understandable given how similar they seem on the surface. But the reality is that, in many ways, fission and fusion are opposites. Knowing how each one works—and why they are different—is critical to understanding the roles they will play in the decades ahead.
Ask your kids, or some nerd born in the ’80s, about a Pikachu and slip into a twenty-minute explainer suffused with a network of interlocking songs, toys, anime, games, plushies, and manga, each of which makes no sense on its own.
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.”
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.