Reader's Digest: September 9, 2023

Catching up on The New Yorker, I came across an essay by the always-fascinating Kathryn Schulz, about the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.

Linnaeus was apparently a prodigy of nature:

As word of Linnaeus’s gifts spread, he began acquiring friends in high places, including one who offered him a position delivering lectures at the university’s botanic gardens. That appointment earned Linnaeus some ire—it was normally reserved for academic elder statesmen, and he was still technically an undergraduate—but it further established his reputation as a rising star, and the talks he gave at the gardens routinely drew hundreds of people.

How did he manage this, you ask? What was the secret of his audience appeal?

The answer is: sex sells. Linnaeus had uncovered the sexual lives of plants, which reproduce by “releasing pollen to fertilize the ovules contained in pistils.”

Useful as these ideas were, they scandalized some of Linnaeus’s contemporaries, not least because the plant k…