The female shoots the enticing potion from holes just above her eyes. She’ll return to the male’s den each day, dousing her prospective lover over and over until he comes around to her, letting her into his den without harm. During her two weeks with her new mate, she’ll molt her shell and allow him to fill her new sperm pouch. While males will fall victim to this seduction regularly, females are more selective, saving up sperm to use for years to come, says Prager.
Lobsters are just one sea creature that reminds us land-dwellers how strange sex under the sea can be. From fish making bass-music mating calls that can travel miles inland to an octopus sealing the deal by handing off an arm that’s full of sperm—there’s no one right way of getting it on in the ocean.
One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth.
How to comprehend the vastness of the cosmos; how to comprehend not just the mystery of our place and purpose within it, but also our own lives as we live them on earth? Martin MacInnes’s Booker-longlisted third novel, “In Ascension,” is an elegiac voyage through these questions, a vaulting exploration of the interplay between the micro and the macro, the human and the otherworldly.
A riveting debut that blends crime fiction with social commentary, Tierney’s storytelling and nuanced character development offer a thought-provoking exploration of darkness, resilience and the human capacity for both good and evil.
When did blogging become indistinguishable from a marketing strategy? Amid such business school terms as content ecosystem, video embedding, cross-channel promotion, and user experience, have we lost sight of the basic purpose of a blog: to communicate?
Not Phillip Lopate. In 2016, the respected essayist, short story writer, film critic, novelist, and poet accepted a challenge from the editors of The American Scholar to write 45 new essays on his blog in the space of a year. Lopate agreed, despite disdaining the very idea of the form. But he soon discovered that the freedom to “exit quickly” was only one of the blog’s advantages.
So, why does Hitch still matter? What can we learn from him today? Eloquent conviction, for one. But, more importantly, his skill for close textual readings of a “subtle and suspicious-minded kind” (as Parker dubbed it), brandished with equal potency in all directions. Few idols were sacred for Hitchens (though he revered George Orwell and Thomas Paine, largely for their clarity of vision), and his nimbleness of mind allowed him to see threats brewing that dawned too late for many.
Of course, great mountains are dangerous places, for all who do business on their flanks: Avalanches have taken the lives of climbers and snowboarders in equal measure. But to me the choice is stark, pitting the nobility of ambition against the ache for the merely thrilling. Whether to plant a flag on a summit and look with the pride of achievement up into the endless blue — or to risk ending the ride of a life with that terrible airless dark, and that ghastly, immemorial whumpf!