Today, as a biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, Pravosudov focusses on chickadees. It’s impossible to measure a wild bird’s retrieval accuracy precisely: among other things, there’s no way of knowing when a bird looks in the wrong place before the right one. Still, “every time I see them recovering, they look very purposeful,” Pravosudov said. When a chickadee retrieves a seed from bark or lichen, he noted, “They don’t search, they just go boom, and they just pull it out. When you see this, it’s very, very impressive.”
All of which raises a question: If a bird can remember where it’s placed thousands of seeds in the forest, why can’t I find my pants? It would be good to know how birds evolved such extraordinary memories so different from our own.
There’s something special — let’s say pure — about the form: a short, funny news headline, together with an image that reinforces the joke. A perfect mini-puzzle that gives the reader a momentary thrill of possessing superior intelligence, the understanding that comes after a millisecond pause of hilarity. (There might be an added benefit, too, of information: I’ve often experienced learning of news fact through satirical headlines before reading the actual news news). There’s also something fleeting about the form, insofar as it is so tethered to internet consumption, and to internet-time.
As Roland Allen makes abundantly clear in his new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, one reason for the notebook’s continued success has been its remarkable functionality.
As he chronicles the notebook’s roots in ancient Rome – the pugillare, or “handheld” tablet, was the Moleskine of its time – Allen takes readers through every significant iteration up to modern day.
Still, within this book lies an intriguing, if anarchic, analysis of how cities are formed, not just by the top-down imposition of constitutions, charters, and “plans” that dictate spatial layout, nor by backroom deals and competing special interests. Throughout Kahan’s narrative, happenstance, miscommunication, and fecklessness lead to unintended consequences—from Philadelphia losing out on New Deal funding because the Republican mayor, J. Hampton Moore, wanted FDR’s plans to fail (an unpopular move that ended the Republican machine’s stranglehold on city politics) to the tragic MOVE bombing of 1985.