Ze Frank is back with a new show. It’s very nice to see, and so far I’d say I’ll remember it in five years as fondly as I recall The Show. I think this is the best episode he’s posted so far.

Very interesting story of the peculiar kind of intelligence we’re still learning to perceive in octopi. For example:

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: “Three rocks are enough. Good night!”

(via Kottke)

I’ve told you how much I love deep-dives from the LRB and NYRB, this “Letter from Guatemala” is almost as good as similar things in those magazines. A few more things like this come across my lap and I might have to start closely following the LARB. If they focus on Latin America and the Pacific I’m already sold.

John Terborgh’s piece about the moral question of “uncontacted tribes” and the history of that answer in Brazil is a great read. As someone who’d mused at the thought a little, but never done much else, I learned quite a lot.

This McSweeney’s piece, whether or not it knows it, is about the Buddhist idea that dukkha (“suffering”) in an inherent characteristic of samsara (the flow of life). In English, it’s about how our constant seeking after passions, objects, and experiences causes us a great deal of confusion, frustration, and pain. And finally, to paraphrase Daniel Gilbert, it’s about how the things we think will make us happy rarely do.

(via Kottke)

Oliver Burkeman’s latest features a very interesting, underrated, and useful observation about the way we think.

Faced with a cognitively demanding question, involving uncertainty – “Will this person do the job well if hired?” – interviewers unconsciously substitute an easier question, and answer that one instead: “Did this person impress me in the interview?” We all do it, all the time.

David Cain hit the ball out of the park on this one. I literally finished it and said to myself (with a giggle), “That was both novel and enlivening.” If there’s a better standard to aspire to, I don’t know what it is. If you’re really too lazy to read it, the central thesis:

It’s an interesting quirk of Mother Nature — that she insists on taking us down to the ground like that, every day, no matter who we are. For all of us, the act of leaving consciousness is the same, it’s just our settings and situations — which bookend that unconsciousness — where we differ.

Diane Ravitch’s review of a few books about the state of American education is interesting, if only because she’s one of the few people I’ve seen standing athwart the consensus on the topic yelling “Stop!”. (To appropriate W.F. Buckley.) Whether or not you agree with her, I found this point salient:

If we were to improve the teaching profession, then perhaps more of the talented young people who now apply to Teach for America would choose to enter teaching as a career, not as a stepping stone to graduate school or another more remunerative line of work.

With Mitt Romney’s possibly certain status as the Republican presidential candidate, Mormonism is in the air. But the details of Mormon history aren’t. I had no knowledge of the Mountain Meadows massacre — explained here by Gilbert King on the Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect blog — which is a pretty horrific reflection on the actions of the young Mormon church.

This piece got a reasonable amount of attention around the idea of its title that you don’t need to sleep for eight hours, but I found the far more interesting component of it to be the research into how people used to sleep in the past, and how it’s changed. This was all new to me:

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

(via HN)