After-Orts #47
The achievement of an individual self, a being with a unique past and a trajectory into the future, is one of the glories of human evolution, but it is not without its drawbacks and potential disorders. The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature.
-- Michel Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, chapter 5
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Fashion is such a far-reaching thing. It isn’t content with all that goes on a woman; it extends to all that goes around, under, and over her. It is responsible for her figure, her complexion, and her state of mind. It won’t even stop at inanimate things— it extends to her very dog. Fancy carrying a short full dog when Paris insists on long straight lines, or trying to combine a Louis XVI–style dog with a moyen-âge gown—well, it simply isn’t done, that’s all.
-- Dorothy Parker, Every Dog Will Have His Day (1917)
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/fashion/every-dog-will-have-his-day
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Physarum polycephalum, which recently made its debut at the Paris Zoo, is a bright, egg yolk yellow, has 720 sexual configurations and a vaguely fruity smell, and appears to be motivated by, among other things, a passionate love of oatmeal.
In one remarkable study published in Science, Japanese researchers created a model of the Tokyo metropolitan area using oat flakes to represent population centers, and found that Physarum polycephalum configured itself into a near replica of the famously intuitive Tokyo rail system.
— both, in a fascinating article by Lacy M. Johnson, What Slime Knows, in Orion magazine:
https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-slime-knows