What Insects Go Through Is Even Weirder Than We Thought

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What Insects Go Through Is Even Weirder Than We Thought     “For me, it was a road-to-Damascus type of moment,” James Truman, an entomologist, told me, recalling an encounter when he was sixteen. “My family had a summer place, a trailer, on the shores of Lake Erie. I was walking through the trailer park when I looked up and I saw an insect up in a tree. It was a parasitic wasp, with an abdomen three inches long.” He thought, What the heck is that? That curiosity “caused me to get a book,” Truman said. It was “Field Book of Insects,” by Frank E. Lutz, first published in 1918, with detailed drawings by the scientific illustrator Edna Libby Beutenmüller. “I had always known I wanted to be a biologist, but I had flipped from one interest to another: birds, mammals, whatever,” Truman said. Then he was transformed. He knew he would study insects.Insects are small, sure, but they represent more than eighty per cent of animal species. They also have a special magic: most of them undergo complete metamorphosis. The ladybug begins life as a spiky black crawler; the garden tiger moth starts out life as an extravagantly furred caterpillar. Some fish and amphibians also metamorphose (mammals never!), but because insects have exoskeletons—their metamorphic transformation happens out of sight—when the adult creature emerges, fully formed, the effect can be as astonishing as Athena transforming a falling Perdix into a partridge, or Daphne being turned into a laurel tree. Continued here

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The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer's Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love     Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist.” In consequence, we move through love in a clumsy dance of approach and withdrawal, trying to negotiate the optimal distance for that elusive, ecstatic feeling of spacious togetherness. Continued here

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Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden     Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden. No wonder Emily Dickinson spent her life believing that “to be Flower, is profound Responsibility.” No wonder Virginia Woolf had her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the garden.The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them (public library). Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.” Continued here

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How to Tap the Full Potential of Telemedicine     Telemedicine visits in the United States have fallen sharply since April 2020, but the end of the pandemic should not spell the end of telemedicine. It can play a valuable role in the delivery of health care. The key to tapping its potential is to bring many elements of the clinic to the patient. An array of new technologies and services is making that possible. Continued here

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How Brands Can Sell to Environmentally Conscious Nonconsumers     New research into how consumer attitudes about climate change affect their behavior and purchasing habits find that the largest segment is “Conscious Non-consumers” — that is, people who have changed their behavior to help the environment, but are not purchasing environmentally friendly products. For companies selling these products, reaching this segment of consumers can be a source of profits and impact. The research finds specific barriers that prevent this group from making sustainable purchases — and corresponding strategies to help overcome those barriers. Continued here

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How to Fight a Price War     Price wars—retaliatory cuts in prices to win customers—can devastate managers, companies, even entire industries. Yet they’re increasingly common in electronic and traditional commerce. Witness the great price battle of 1999 in the long-distance phone industry: after the dust cleared, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint all saw their stock prices dip by as much as 5%. Continued here

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How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight     Top-level managers know that conflict over issues is natural and even necessary. Management teams that challenge one another’s thinking develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options, and make better decisions. But the challenge–familiar to anyone who has ever been part of a management team–is to keep constructive conflict over issues from degenerating into interpersonal conflict. From their research on the interplay of conflict, politics, and speed in the decision-making process of management teams, the authors have distilled a set of six tactics characteristic of high-performing teams: Continued here

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Why boycotts eventually fall into 'the dustbin of outrage'     For the first time in six years, Target announced a sales drop: a decline of 5% in the April to June 2023 period, compared with the same time in 2022. During that time, the big-box retailer was also embroiled in a controversy over their collection of merchandise for Pride Month, which spurred consumer backlash and boycotts from some politically conservative shoppers.Coincidence? Perhaps not, said Christina Hennington, Target's executive vice president, on the company's Q2 2023 earnings call. She attributed the sales decline in part to a "strong reaction to this year's Pride assortment" that affected store traffic, and also cut the company's full-year forecast.  Continued here

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Eight startling images of life under the Mafia     If you were a newspaper photographer working in Palermo at the height of the Sicilian Mafia's power, you had to get used to being woken up by telephone calls in the middle of the night. There's been a murder, your editor would tell you, before giving you an address so you could rush to the scene.More like this: - The most iconic photos of the American West - Photos that show landscapes few can see - Why 1960 was a turning point for Africa Continued here

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Ferrari review: Adam Driver's latest is 'stuck in the slow lane'     Adam Driver played an Italian industrialist with a resentful wife in House of Gucci as recently as 2021, but he does the same thing again in Ferrari, the first film in eight years to be directed by Michael Mann. This time it's Penélope Cruz rather than Lady Gaga who co-stars as his fiery other half, but the two films have much in common, not least the international cast delivering English dialogue in a variety of Italian accents that probably should have been confined to a Super Mario Bros movie. Maybe Driver felt that, with his surname, he had no choice but to play Enzo Ferrari, racing champion-turned car manufacturer.More like this: - Oppenheimer is 'a flat-out masterpiece' - Is Tom Cruise the last action hero? - The film that captured actors' AI fears Continued here

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Lindokuhle Sobekwa's powerful personal journey as a photographer in South Africa     Lindokuhle Sobekwa has been awarded South Africa’s 2023 FNB Art Prize. He becomes the first artist using documentary photography as his primary medium to win the prestigious competition. Born in Katlehong in 1995, Sobekwa began learning photography skills in 2012, through the Of Soul and Joy photography education programme in Thokoza township, where his family had moved. He knew, as a young boy, that he thought in images, visualising what he experienced. Encountering cameras, he realised there was equipment – a small machine, a perforated roll of clear plastic, and a chemical reaction – able to externalise his thought processes. Continued here

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Special counsels, like the one leading the Justice Department's investigation of Hunter Biden, are intended to be independent - but they aren't entirely     On June 20, 2023, Hunter Biden, the second son of President Joe Biden, entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors related to tax-related charges and the illegal possession of a firearm.On July 26, the plea agreement was challenged by the judge in the case. She wanted to know more about any immunity being offered, given that Hunter Biden is under several federal investigations. Continued here

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RICO is often used to target the mob and cartels - but Trump and his associates aren't the first outside those worlds to face charges     It might seem odd to some that former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants, many of whom are lawyers and served as senior government officials, were charged with racketeering regarding their alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.Racketeering charges are complex but generally speak to dishonest business dealings. Many racketeering prosecutions involve lucrative criminal enterprises, such as illegal drug operations or the Mafia. Continued here

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Trans students benefit from gender-inclusive classrooms, research shows - and so do the other students and science itself     Across the U.S., legislators are debating how and when sex and gender should be discussed in the classroom and beyond. Specifically, these bills are considering whether anything beyond male or female can be included in library books and lesson plans. These bills are part of a larger debate on how to define and regulate sex and gender, and there are no immediate answers that satisfy everyone.Many of the bills draw on science to make claims about sex and gender. For example, Florida House Bill 1069, which legislates pronoun use in schools, assumes that all of a person’s sex markers – listed as sex chromosomes, “naturally occurring” sex hormones and internal and external genitalia at birth – will align as female or male “based on the organization of the body … for a specific reproductive role.” The bill claims that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” Continued here

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How to get federal disaster aid: FEMA is running out of money, but these strategies can help survivors of Hurricane Idalia and the Maui fires get aid faster     As questions loom over the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to fund disaster recovery efforts, people who lost homes to recent wildfires and storms are trying to make their way through the difficult process of securing financial aid.Residents in communities hit by Hurricane Idalia, the Maui fires or other recent disasters have a long, tough journey ahead. How well the initial disaster response meets their needs has far-reaching consequences for community resilience, especially for vulnerable residents, as we saw after Hurricanes Katrina and Maria. Continued here

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Peruvian writers tell of a future rooted in the past and contemporary societal issues     The Aymara people of the Andean Highlands speak of “qhipa pacha,” a phrase that refers to the future as a direction one walks to backward. They believe in looking to the past as a way to understand what may come next.Last year, 13 Peruvian writers launched the Qhipa Pacha Collective, a literary initiative which “aims to recover the memory of our original peoples to build possible worlds.” These writers imagine futures that reflect Peruvian ideas and concerns about their past and present. Continued here

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Michael Oher, Mike Tyson and the question of whether you own your life story     What if you overcame a serious illness to go on to win an Olympic medal? Could a writer or filmmaker decide to tell your inspiring story without consulting you? Or do you “own” that story and control how it gets retold?Michael Oher, the former NFL player portrayed in the 2009 blockbuster “The Blind Side,” has sued Michael and Anne Leigh Tuohy, the suburban couple who took him into their home as a disadvantaged youth. Continued here

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Space junk in Earth orbit and on the Moon will increase with future missions - but nobody's in charge of cleaning it up     There’s a lot of trash on the Moon right now – including nearly 100 bags of human waste – and with countries around the globe traveling to the Moon, there’s going to be a lot more, both on the lunar surface and in Earth’s orbit.In August 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, while India’s Chandrayann-3 mission successfully landed in the southern polar region, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon. Continued here

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Ukraine war: the implications of Moscow moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus     Russia is reported to have deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, a step that was much telegraphed earlier this year and recently confirmed by Poland. This move has caused concern in neighbouring countries and has affected security arrangements in Europe. Russia reportedly has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, with (as of 2023) 5,889 nuclear warheads compared to 5,244 deployed by the US. But size (or, more accurately, numbers of warheads) should not be important. Continued here