by Bill Murray

We humans think we’re so smart. But animals and plants, too, have far more wisdom and abilities than we give them credit for. This is the third in an occasional series of links to the remarkable world of non-human abilities. The first two are here and here.

Zebra finches pick singing coaches based on songs they hear as embryos. The songs that Australian zebra finches hear before they have hatched influence which birds they choose as singing instructors when growing up.

Hammerhead sharks close their gills, essentially holding their breath as they dive more than 2,600 feet from tropical surface waters into the ocean’s frigid depths multiple times every night to hunt for fish and squid.

Giant Tarantulas keep tiny frogs as pets so that the frog can protect the spider’s eggs from insects and the spider can protect the frog from predators.

Bats remember favors and hold grudges; socially distance and go quiet when ill; and use vocal labels that reveal individual and kin identity. Male bats learn territorial songs in specific dialects from their fathers and, much like birds, sing these songs to defend territory and attract mates, which scientists characterize as culture.

Insects in general do not rely on steady flow of air but create controlled turbulence called a vortex at the top of their wings. By sweeping their wings at a sharp angle bees generate “horizontal mini-tornadoes” to carry them aloft.

Penguin huddles move and change shape during cold winds to minimize the heat loss each penguin experiences. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Steve Szilagyi

You don’t need to be told that Halloween yard decorations have gotten tackier over the years. Complaining misses the point. Their jokey vulgarity is the point—as if America in 2025 were so buttoned-up that people need yet another occasion to act out their bad taste in public.

Front lawns have always been small stages where homeowners perform belonging. A generation ago, lawn jockeys did the job; now it’s perfect turf and pruned boxwoods, silent signals of order and disposable income. A good yard says: we’re respectable, we fit in.

So, what do the gravestones, twelve-foot skeletons, and dangling corpses say?

Holiday decorating is contagious. One house hangs Christmas lights, and by next year the whole block glitters. Studies even show that people who decorate for the holidays are seen as friendlier and more community-minded—more neighborly altogether.

David J. Skal writes about Halloween and its customs in his entertaining 2002 book; Death Makes a Holiday. There, he tells of a couple in Des Plaines, Illinois whose Halloween display grew to include a guillotine, a blood fountain, and forty life-size monsters, until traffic jams forced the city to shut it down. “We were just trying to do something fun for the neighborhood,” the wife said as she dismantled the blood fountain. Read more »

Jaffer Kolb. Lake Mývatn, October 13th, 12:08 am.

Digital photograph.

With permission.

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by TJ Price

I did not expect to be watching so-called “reality TV” this weekend. It’s not a habit of mine; I’m not the kind of person who typically consumes that kind of media—at least, not willingly. There’ve been a few exceptions to this: back in the early aughts, I did watch almost all of Jersey Shore, and at some point in the ensuing years, a friend cajoled me into watching one episode of Real Housewives of Orange County. When one of the titular Housewives began to run water from their hyper-stylish tap in order to wash a whole (raw) chicken, I yanked the EJECT lever harder than a fighter pilot in distress. In most reality TV, I find there’s a kind of mise-en-abyme effect, one whose chasm can sometimes echo with l’appel du vide. How endlessly recursive, this construct of hyperreality—especially when those on-screen seem compulsively aware of the media tesseract to which they have surrendered.

This is what led to my fascination with Love is Blind, during a recent visit to my friend Chelsea. Love is Blind, to be brief, is a reality television show predicated on stripping out the vector of physical attraction in the courses of the initial stages of dating. Contestants are limited to adjacent rooms (called “pods”) separated by a constantly-shifting panel of screen-saver pinks and reds—in some moments resembling the walls of a womb. There is no access to personal phones or computers, and when not in the “pods,” the contestants are divided into either the men’s quarters or the women’s quarters. These are only ever shown as communal spaces, with a variety of couches and chairs, and a kitchen area, seemingly used for the sole purpose of beverage preparation.

These beverages are seen constantly throughout the episodes, in uniformly brushed, metallic drinkware of different sizes and shapes. There are mugs, wine glasses, and tumblers, all of which shine dully under the klieg lights: burnished and yet tarnished simultaneously. When in the “pods,” contestants are often seen holding them while perorating blandly on the necessity of authenticity in relationships—either unaware of the irony or willfully ignoring it. (At one point, a contestant even had a total of seven of these vessels grouped around them in the shot, suggesting that quite a bit of imbibing had occurred during the “date.”) Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded a few days ago. The prizes for peace, economics and sometimes literature have become so discredited in my lifetime–to the point of  inspiring anti-Nobel prizes–that my response to their bestowal every year has usually consisted of a bemused scoffing, rather like when one continues to watch a movie to see how bad it can get. But my reaction to this year’s award was more like what I think I would feel if I witnessed someone run off the road right in front of me; there was a not insubstantial personal sense of violation attached to it, even though it didn’t directly affect me, of course. In terms of the recipient, as well as the circumstances surrounding the affair, I was so struck by an idea of the rottenness of traditional international institutions collapsing under the accelerating moral and intellectual decay of Trump and his aligned political movements that I decided I could justifiably waste one of my humble columns on it.

Most people are aware that Donald Trump has been, for an interminable amount of time, asserting that he deserves the peace prize for a number of things, especially the 7 or 8 wars he claims to have “solved”, including conflicts between states that do not, and never have existed, and involving countries even on different sides of the world that never had, in any case, much to do with each other. The pertinent fact here is that Trump was inaugurated a mere eleven days after nominations for the 2025 prize were closed, so his nomination was always going to be an exceptionally long shot, much as Trump’s jealousy of the pre-inauguration award to President Obama might inspire endless preposterous protestations. But they have made an award to him increasingly likely in 2026 (especially with the mid-term elections taking place a mere weeks after the Peace prize announcement in early-October). Norway is reported to be preparing to respond to tariffs and other measures Trump might impose in response to the Norwegian-based Nobel Peace Committee’s (a non-governmental organization, mind) giving the prize to someone other than himself, which testifies to the potential room for meddling, intrusion and influence-peddling in the seemingly independent deliberations of important and influential organizations operating in a traditional international system that happens to be crumbling. The fact that Norway is now an increasingly important member of NATO, whose ex-president and current finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, led the organization, serves to increase this likelihood.  Stoltenberg has had an extremely complex and sensitive relation, to put it mildly, with Trump, whose views on NATO (and I do not say this as a fan of NATO, or of Stoltenberg’s), as in so many other things, range from erratic to incomprehensible.

But all this is only a small part of the story. The prize was ultimately bestowed upon Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela for keeping, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “the flame of democracy burning” in that country. Machado has been an opposition leader in Venezuela for a very long time, and when I say opposition leader, I am speaking of someone whose notion of opposition extends to active participation in and support for US-supported coups, that go back to the days of the government of Hugo Chavez from 1999 on, and continues under President Nicholas Maduro, including one as recently in 2018, under Trump himself. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship – a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.

The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI – AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity.

On the whole, however, the book feels like a missed opportunity to take the authors’ highly detailed knowledge and push their conclusions further. These limitations come through on a few different levels. First, the book feels dated in terms of its conception of AI. Although some examples are from this year, such as DOGE’s attempted hollowing-out of government, many pre-date the LLM era and could easily have been included in a book written five years ago, which is an eternity in AI. Many examples relate to models trained on thousands of examples, not billions, and the authors do not distinguish enough between which examples are more relevant for pre-ChatGPT AI models, and which for today’s General-Purpose AI.

Second, the authors pull their punches. The authors make clear that they do not want to engage with the more speculative risks of “AI doomers”, but in staying away from anything that smells of speculation, they stay too close to the world of yesterday, thereby excluding many of the risks from AI to democracy that we are already seeing signs of. Read more »

by Richard Farr

A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people. 

If the story of Shackleton’s grandiosely-branded Imperial Antarctic Expedition is not familiar, I recommend Alfred Lansing’s spare and compelling Endurance, followed by Caroline Alexander’s more detailed The Endurance, which is also graced with expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s original pictures. In summary: Amundsen having “beaten” Scott in a “race to the Pole” (see note), Shackleton — also beaten — decided that a transit across Antarctica might be the next big headline. His “exceptionally strong wooden ship” left England in the last days of 1914; the following month at 77°S it became trapped in pack ice. Held fast for eight more months and slowly drifting north, it was crushed at last. Shackleton and his men, unable to reach land, began a desperate fight against cold and starvation culminating in the legendary journey of the lifeboat James Caird across 800 miles of ocean to South Georgia. “The Boss” then organized the rescue of his remaining men from Elephant Island.

In 2022 an expedition using remotely operated submersibles located the wreck, perfectly preserved under 3,000 meters of cold Weddell Sea. One of the expedition members, Jukka Tuhkuri, wondered exactly why it had been crushed — a good question that few had bothered to ask because the answer seemed obvious. (“Wooden ship! Pack ice!”) On examination, a different answer was equally obvious: by 1914 shipwrights knew a great deal about constructing wooden ships so that they would not be crushed by Antarctic conditions; unfortunately Endurance was not one of them. Its hull had been designed for the entirely different sea conditions of the polar north. 

So to the punchline: the record shows that Shackleton knew this. Had the sainted explorer taken the wrong ship, known he was doing so, and covered it up? Was he not the perfectly wise, honest and resolute leader after all? A chink in the myth perhaps?  Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

About two weeks ago, on October 3rd, news broke that the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was no more. The NZBA was one of several business-led alliances convened by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEP-FI), with the goal of helping the financial industry to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, with interim goals set for 2030. These various alliances (such as the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, which itself died in 2024, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, which suspended its activities earlier this year) were themselves grouped under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), founded by UNEP-FI at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 and co-chaired by former central banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance), billionaire and erstwhile presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambitions and Solutions), and Mary Shapiro, former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (Acronym-averse readers are in for a rough ride.) Membership in GFANZ was conditional on a commitment (and demonstrable efforts) to align business activities with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial temperatures.

At its founding in 2021, the NZBA’s membership comprised 42 banks representing about 28.5 trillion dollars. In 2024, membership had peaked at 140 banks representing about 74 trillion dollars. Its insurance equivalent, the NZIA, peaked in 2022 with 291 members representing 66 trillion dollars. How did these initiatives collapse, despite the participation of most of the world’s corporate financial power? American democracy ruined it. More precisely, Republicans gained control of the federal House of Representatives in the 2022 mid-term elections, and signalled that they would investigate companies participating in climate initiatives for anti-trust violations. This emboldened Republican-led state governments to launch their own “anti-woke” intimidation campaigns against financial companies flirting with ecological sustainability. Several Republican attorneys general threatened in 2022 to file anti-trust suits against participating financial institutions, prompting some NZBA member institutions on Wall Street to threaten to leave that alliance unless membership criteria were neutered to placate Republican climate change deniers and fossil puppets (the banks did not use such accurate language in explaining their predicament). GFANZ weakened its requirement that members move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their funded activities by 50% by 2030.

This would not, of course, be enough to appease the Republican-represented fossil cartels (to be fair, the Democrats are also quite adept and practiced at representing the fossil cartels’ interests against the interests of American citizens, humanity in general, and all extant terrestrial life). Read more »

ChatGPT confirmed that this is Virginia Creeper and also suggested a caption: “Autumn’s rebellion against the wire.”

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by Eric Schenck

In December of 2016 I hitchhiked from Dallas, Texas to Tucson, Arizona to visit my best friend.

It was the day after Christmas. I wanted to make it there by New Years – and I did.

Here are my stats:

• Total days: 4
• Total drivers: 12
• Total miles traveled: 956
• Shortest ride of the trip: 15 miles (the first one)
• Longest ride of the trip: 350 miles (the last one)
• People who didn’t pick me up: about a million 🙂

I was craving a little bit of adventure, and I certainly got it. 

Hitchhiking the U.S. was fun, scary, and (at times) even made me laugh. But more important than these things?

Everything it taught me:

If somebody is nice, it doesn’t matter how weird they are.

One of my first drivers was a guy in a baseball cap. He smiled when I climbed in, nodded when I said thanks, and didn’t say a word the entire time.

Something else interesting about him? He had about 1,500 beer cans in the back of his truck. Before he dropped me off, I helped him unload them at the dump.

When I finally got out, he gave me one more nod, and then was on his way. 

Weird?

Definitely.

But he gave me a ride, and that’s all that matters. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Laurie Sheck

1.

It has been over 200 years since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the stormy summer of 1816. Although she was only eighteen, she had already lost one child just days after giving birth; her second child, William, was a few months old. By the time Frankenstein was published, in 1818, Mary had given birth to a third child, Clara Everina, who would live for a little more than a year. It was within this context of rapid cycling between birth and death, welcoming and loss, joy and pain, that Frankenstein came into being. Mary’s own mother, the writer Mary Wollestonecraft, had died thirteen days after Mary’s birth.

The first edition was published anonymously on January 1, 1818, by the small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, with a dedication to Mary’s father, the writer and political philosopher William Godwin, and an unsigned preface by Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley.

The reviews, though mixed, could be searingly negative. Most of them assumed the author was a man. Several conjectured the author was Percy Shelley himself.

“Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents…Our taste and our judgment revolt at this kind of writing…it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners or morality…it fatigues the feelings without understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart….” The review ends wondering whether “the head or heart of this author is the most diseased.” (The Quarterly Review, January 1818).

A review in La Belle Assemble, was more positive, “This is a very bold fiction.” So was Walter Scott’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine where he pronounced the book, “An extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination,” though he found the self-education of the Monster, “improbable and overstrained.”

Although The Edinburgh Magazine found the Monster to be “a very amiable personage” it encouraged the anonymous author to “study the established order of nature as it appears…than to continue to revolt our feelings by hazardous innovations.”

The British Critic also referred to the “diseased” and “wandering imagination” of the author and suggested the writer “might be disciplined to something better.”  “The writer of it is, we understand, a female: this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke recently at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. He was asked how he balances stare decisis with originalism, and he made the following remarks:

Well, if I find it doesn’t make any sense … I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.

[I]f [it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.

I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.

At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis, and it’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?

We never go to the front, see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, and you’re going to follow that? I think we owe our fellow citizens more than that.

To be clear, I have nothing good to say about Clarence Thomas. I think he’s a particularly bad judge, even relative to the rest of the bad judges on the Supreme Court. I think he (and they) are wrong on every significant issue. But I agree with him on this. If a decision is totally stupid, if it doesn’t make any sense, and there is an orangutan driving the train, we shouldn’t turn off our brains and go along.

The problem, of course, is that he and I disagree about which decisions are the stupid ones. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Under Construction. December 2023.

Digital photograph.

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