“I was swallowed by a hippo.” A hungry, hungry hippo.

In the NYT, a new weekly Carl Zimmer column. The first one is on the imminent cicada invasion. The second one will follow in 17 years.

An exquisite, refreshing evisceration of The Great Gatsby, by Kathryn Schultz

Some English words have staying power, may go back 15,000 years to an Ice Age language.

“Any two Europeans are likely to have many common ancestors who lived around 1,000 years ago” – very cool research from Peter Ralph. And more from Carl Zimmer, who is unimpressed by your links to Charlemagne.

“An arcane & eldritch item of fashionable nonsense in the shuddering slush-pile of human evolutionary rubbish” – on the