Reader's Digest: September 23, 2023

In an especially excellent edition of the LRB, Francis Gooding writes about alleged orca activism, our anthropomorphic tendencies, and a surprising collaboration with fisherman in New South Wales. Hard to excerpt, but a highlight is Gooding’s discussion of orcas’ “behavioural fads, which can spread through groups quickly before petering out”:

the most famous of these involved three pods in Puget Sound that in 1987 spent a few weeks carrying dead salmon around on their heads.

More extensively quotable is Alice Spawls on the artist Gwen John, who’s been mentioned here before:

In October​ 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester put on an exhibition of works by the painters Gwen John and Celia Paul. What now seems obvious was then inspired. The comparison diminished neither. Two artists, distinct but in obvious affinity, spoke across their different periods and each made the other more necessary, more triumphant. It was as though Cézanne and Van Gogh had lived a century apart, the fingers …