A Uni­ver­sity of Chicago psy­chol­o­gist ana­lyzed baby names cat­a­loged for the past 50 years and found a mod­ern right-side bias.

Proust’s madeleine was quite dry. It demanded not just a quick dunk, but immer­sion to “soften” it (accord­ing to the new trans­la­tion by Lydia Davis, said to be the most accu­rate). And, you’ll note, Mar­cel never bites the cookie. The mem­ory surge is trig­gered by crumbs.

In extra­or­di­nary scenes filmed for a new doc­u­men­tary, young dol­phins were seen care­fully manip­u­lat­ing a cer­tain kind of puffer fish which, if pro­voked, releases a nerve toxin.

iOS is pinned down by its early inter­face deci­sions. Deci­sions that were made to help users relate older, phys­i­cal ideas to this new, touch-driven soft­ware platform.

Over the past sev­eral years, those of us who work in brand­ing or design have heard var­i­ous author­i­ties tell us that we basi­cally are “sto­ry­tellers.” For the first cou­ple times, I accepted this neol­o­gism with­out much resis­tance. But as more and more upper-management types used the word, it seemed…imprecise.

Why are contemporary-art pho­tographs so devoid of smiles? In many cases it’s not just an absence of joy, but a total lack of emo­tional affect. Walk into a high-end gallery in any major art city today, and—if pho­tographs are on show—you’re likely to see images of peo­ple wear­ing blank, zombie-like expres­sions. The style, called dead­pan, is ubiquitous.