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Clean-Living Canines, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Paar_Doggen_C_Reichert

Carl Reichert, Paar Doggen

  • Jane Austen read her own reviews, and took scrupulous notes: “Austen appears to have compiled the reactions of her readers from letters, hearsay, and direct conversations and recorded them on a set of closely written pages around 1815, before her death at the age of forty-one, two years later.”
  • From now till June 21, you can apply for a residency with Write A House, a new program with a terrific mission: to renovate homes in Detroit and then to give them, permanently, to writers. One of those writers may be you.
  • “Dogs have a kind of moral code—one long hidden to humans until a cognitive ethologist named Marc Bekoff began to crack it … If three dogs are playing and one bites or tackles too hard, the other two are likely to give him the cold shoulder and stop playing with him, Bekoff says. Such behavior, he says, suggests that dogs are capable of morality, a mindset once thought to be uniquely human.”
  • Today in artificially intelligent cyborg assassin news: “a team of scientists destined to doom us all has developed the first bionic particles fusing organic materials and synthetic semiconductors, in a project they openly admit is ‘inspired by fictional cyborgs like the Terminator.’”
  • “In 1835, the Finnish linguist Elias Lönnrot published The Kalevala, a compilation of traditional epic poetry. In his home country, The Kalevala is now considered to be one of the most important works of literature of all time … Five photographers traveled to Kainuu in Northeast Finland, the birthplace of The Kalevala, and explored the mythology through contemporary photography.”