Saturday 23rd January 2010
by CarolineThe January 25 New Yorker fiction is Trailhead, an account of the life and times of an ant queen and the colony she establishes. Ants are kind of gross, and some of the details are kind of gross too, but it’s compelling stuff and doesn’t romanticize the ants:
First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her wings. To do that, she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body; it caused no pain. The Queen was a parachutist who slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid the ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle.
The same issue has a long profile of Neil Gaiman and this insane piece on cryonics. It’s definitely worth picking up.
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