Sublime

The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of

views, personality traits, and sexual orientation, it could monitor processes inside our hearts and brains. The necessary biometric technology is already being developed by some governments and companies, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Musk’s company has conducted experiments on live rats, sheep, pigs, and monkeys, implanting electrical probes into

On the plane, a flight attendant came around with newspapers. All the adults were reading them. I took one, too. From the International Herald Tribune, I learned that a ninety-five-hundred-pound elephant called Kika had been artificially inseminated in Berlin. The sperm had been taken from two male elephants and there was no way of knowing for

(Herbert Simon said it best: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”)

Although it may seem a little surprising that your sense of smell is influenced by sex hormones (whether your own or those in the pill), it actually makes a lot of sense when we think about what your different sensory systems do. A major charge of these systems (which includes your sense not only of smell but also sound, sight, and taste) is to