MyAppleMenu Reader

Friday, July 4, 2025

How Smell Guides Our Inner World, by Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine

Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.

Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.

'He Was A Violent Socialist': How Superman Started Out As A Radical Rebel, by Nicholas Barber, BBC

The first Superman strips were written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, and published in Action Comics magazine in 1938 by DC (or National Allied, as the company was then called). And in those, he was a far more unruly, and in some ways far more modern character. He was "a head-bashing Superman who took no prisoners, who made his own law and enforced it with his fists, who gleefully intimidated his foes with a wicked grin and a baleful glare", says Mark Waid, a comics writer and historian, in his introduction to a volume of classic Action Comics reprints. "He was no super-cop. He was a super-anarchist." If this rowdy and rebellious Superman were introduced today, he'd be hailed as one of the most subversive superheroes around.

Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical, by Elizabeth Austin, Electric Lit

In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.

‘The Möbius Book’ Review: A Breakup Story With A Twist, by Toby Lichtig, Wall Street Journal

In the book’s physical edition, the reader chooses which half to read first by flipping the book over. (Both the electronic and audio versions put the novella first.) Really, readers should begin with the memoir: It is both better and makes better sense of the fictional part. The novella—consulted second—acts as a kaleidoscopic lens on the first part, adding complexity and color to the memoir’s narrative. But this is no binary divide. Both sections play with form, both are filled with philosophical reflections, both resist linear narrative as they explore our messy desires, compulsions and repetitions. This is a looping Möbius strip of an inquiry, unyielding to easy resolution.