Gabriel Popkin in Quanta Magazine:
It’s a familiar image, reprinted in countless biology textbooks: an illustration of a typical cell, halved like a grapefruit to reveal its innards. Strands of endoplasmic reticulum encircle a nucleus that floats in the center like a raft. RNA molecules wait patiently at ribosomes to deliver recipes for making proteins. A few vacuoles and Golgi bodies bob about. A mostly deserted cytosol offers a blank backdrop. These are scenes of a calm, rarefied order, as if a cell were a tidy factory with workers individually going about their focused tasks.
Scrub that picture from your mind right now: Cells are anything but calm or rarefied. If you were trapped inside a cell, you would feel like a dancer in a thronged nightclub, constantly jostled by neighbors.
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