Slime mould cognition, a lavender marriage, Siamese diplomacy, flipping fossils, and dogs that annoyed the Inquisition.
A brainless single-celled organism solves mazes and remembers where food was, and biologists have been fighting about what to call that for forty years. The fight is really about what intelligence means.
A gay man raised evangelical writes about the years he spent married to a woman, neither of them lying exactly. Unsparing about what the arrangement cost and what it genuinely gave them both.
Siam stayed independent while everything around it fell to Europe. The account credits a monk-turned-king who spent decades studying his future adversaries, then traded territory to keep a throne.
Plankton across every ocean built their shells spiralling one way, then all switched, then switched back. The proposed explanation involves a kind of speciation nobody has caught in the act.
A reporter talks his way into Balaji Srinivasan's school for aspiring country-founders on a Malaysian island. What he finds is less a startup society than a lonely one.
Veronese painted dogs everywhere, including into a Last Supper, which got him hauled before the Inquisition. Laqueur uses the dogs to trace how Europe decided which animals could stand near the sacred.
Some dementia patients briefly become themselves again days before dying, speaking clearly after years of silence. Well documented, nobody can explain it, and it unsettles how we think memory is stored.
Scotland threw out its content-heavy curriculum in 2011 to teach skills instead, as several countries did. A careful account of what happened to results afterwards, and why the idea keeps returning.
The Pan-American Highway runs from Alaska to Patagonia except for sixty miles of Panamanian swamp. The story of why that gap survived a century of money and enthusiasm aimed at closing it.
A Scottish laird captured at Worcester translated Rabelais into English so inventively he improved on the original, inflating word counts wildly. A funny piece about what a translator owes an author.
A historian finds the palm print of a dead zoo gorilla in an archive, and follows the thread from palmistry into how doctors learned to read hands as evidence of character and illness.
Wolfram, who never writes about his family, writes about the mathematician he lived with for 36 years and who died suddenly. Specific, odd, and better for both qualities.