Sandra Knapp in New Scientist:
There were many excellent science books among this year’s entries, but Our Brains, Our Selves stood out for its combination of beautiful storytelling, rigorous and cutting-edge science told in an engaging way, and, above all, its humanity. Husain is a neuroscientist, but also a clinician: seven of his patients’ stories make up the chapters of the book.
Their conditions vary – one individual is overcome with apathy after surviving a stroke; another believes she is having an affair with her own husband – but they all lead to profound changes. The book is a beautiful exploration of how pathological problems in the brain can cause people to become completely different, such that they are rejected by society.
The golden thread running through the book is the concept of “self” and how the brain influences who we are.
More here.
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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.
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.