Seeds Hear the Rain Sing
How a seedling can hear the rain fall, and how the sound soothes away our stress.
Science & Nature
How Vines and Stories Intertwine
Who knew reading and gardening had such overlap?
How AI Manages to Sound So Wise
I ask chatbots for recipes and gardening advice. Bash Ahmed, a brilliant friend who works in IT, has long exploratory discussions about politics, culture, and finance. When he commented—after the president’s message to “Open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards—Praise be to Allah”—that we were living in Dr. Strangelove, Claude…
Thinking Outside the Box
Geometry needs to be part of the zeitgeist.
The Colonoscopy as Tempo of Mortality
Five years. That allotment sounds like a breather, but in fact is not. The plastic jug of GaviLyte is the bell that tolls for me, and also perhaps for thee.
Dreamworks: Manipulating Our Deepest Secrets
Fragmented sleep might not be restful, but I love it, because I can finally remember what I dreamt. The stories play like movies, colors saturated, plots full of twists. Some are spun from trivia; others are Hitchcockian, suspenseful and complex. Who writes these scripts? Who does that weird and sometimes…
The Culture of Animals, Why They Are Not Us, but Why We Need Them as Our Co-Creators of Reality
Language has allowed us to be bound together by codes of law; to move easily between past and present and future; to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe. But while scholars were busy defending our species’ superiority, biologists were uncovering mysteries of animal communication that shot down one “special” human capacity after another.
Time to Turn Psychopathy Over to AI?
Something dark and sharp must live deep inside me, because when I read “There Are No Psychopaths,” I am disappointed. Psychopaths explain so much. The twisted little smile that crosses someone’s face, quickly hidden, after they cause pain. The impulse, spreading fast these days, to watch the world burn.
How Most of the World Communicates
When I asked for a curator at the Saint Louis Zoo who would educate me about animal communication, I was hoping for chatty, irreverent primates or soulful, wise elephants. Instead, I was sent to Dr. Ed Spevak, the zoo’s acclaimed curator of invertebrates. Brilliant, fired with enthusiasm for his subject…
Where Did I Put My Glasses?
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.” But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted, I have…