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Join Katherine Harmon Courage, award-winning journalist and contributing editor for Scientific American, at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History tonight for a discussion about her book OCTOPUS! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea. Known for their smarts, octopuses have aced many intelligence tests, including opening childproof bottles, solving mazes and even recognizing individual people. Oddly, about two-thirds of an octopus’s brain capacity is spread throughout its eight arms, meaning each one literally has a mind of its own! With these and other remarkable facts, Harmon Courage dives into the mystifying underwater world of the octopus. Her reports from around the globe of her adventures in Spain, Greece, and even Brooklyn, New York, will invite you to experience the scientific discoveries and deep cultural ties that connect us to the octopus.

If recent octopus discoveries have taught us anything, it's that these eight-armed ocean dwellers are smart. They can use tools, change color in an instant, and commission their arms to solve problems.

But they generally do all this as loners. Now, new research into a surprisingly social octopus is shattering even the most expansive ideas of known octopus behavior. 

An annoying thing about living in a republic is that you can't feel completely blameless for the ruinous state of your nation. But the happy loophole is that responsibility for decision-making is so broadly diffused across millions of your fellow citizens that you can always tell yourself that you did what you could but the Other Guys steamrolled you so it's all their fault. My own contribution toward ending gun violence so far has been to feel sick with rage and loathing toward the NRA. Occasionally I'll draw a mean cartoon about it. It's easy and fun to mock gun fanatics, because they're so selfish and scared and weak and mean. It's also pointless, an exercise in frustration and helplessness. Seeing the NRA repeatedly defeat any gun legislation, brutally effective as the Soviets crushing an uprising, has incrementally demoralized me and given me an excuse to give up. As William Greider wrote: "powerlessness also corrupts."

I watched as Noriko did not do the following: comment on her truancy; ask whether she was depressed, on drugs, or a runaway. Instead, Noriko set the three of us up to play catch. We used a wooden toy an older gentleman had made by hand in the playground that morning.

This bamboo toy, a taketumbo, looked a lot like what I used to call a helicopter when I was a kid. It had the shape of that pale brown maple seed, but with a longer stem. This is how you make a taketumbo fly: you place the stem between your palms, rub one hand against the other, then release it. The gist of our game was this: hold the taketumbo; say, because it was fun to say and connected us, "ba-ching"; laugh; release taketumbo towards someone else; laugh again.

After an hour or so of this, Kiko left. I saw her again the next day, at the playground, in her school uniform. She had brought her boyfriend, who was clad in black leather. Both young people said hello politely. We did not play catch. She looked happy."

"All too often, following the “rules” of writing can constrict rather than inspire you. With Story Trumps Structure, you can shed those rules—about three-act structure, rising action, outlining, and more—to craft your most powerful, emotional, and gripping stories. Award-winning novelist Steven James explains how to trust the narrative process to make your story believable, compelling, and engaging, and debunks the common myths that hold writers back from creating their best work. When you focus on what lies at the heart of story—tension, desire, crisis, escalation, struggle, discovery—rather than plot templates and formulas, you’ll begin to break out of the box and write fiction that resonates with your readers."

- Gabriel García Márquez, in an interview with the Paris Review. 

"The single best piece of advice she ever gave me was about a book I was ghosting for a famous black civil rights leader. The editor had come back with some major suggestions for added work. I said I wouldn’t do them. Lois simply said, “Now, Ben, don’t be lazy.”