Yi Izzy Yu

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun (紀昀/紀曉嵐): The Chinese Classic of Weird True Tales, Horror Stories, and Occult Knowledge bit.ly/shadowbookjiyun and Zhiguai (志怪) are both out now. Check them out if you're into horror, the paranormal, translated literature, or flash nonfiction.

Place, personhood, and the hippocampus – the fascinating science of magnetism, autonoeic consciousness, and what makes us who we are themarginalian.org/2026/03/21/way…

河鍋曉斎 Kawanabe Kyosai 1831-1889

What makes you makes the universe – Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger on quantum physics, Eastern philosophy, and the ongoing mystery of consciousness themarginalian.org/2021/11/03/erw…

The measure of a true visionary – Jane Goodall and the indivisibility of art and science themarginalian.org/2025/10/01/jan…

Oh this is so wonderful: Poet May Sarton on how to live openheartedly in a harsh world themarginalian.org/2023/01/01/may…

No brain? No problem! A simple single-celled organism without a brain or neurons appears to be capable of an advanced form of learning. Scientists have discovered that Stentor coeruleus, a giant single-celled organism, is capable of advanced associative learning. It can connect different stimuli without a single neuron—just like Pavlov's dogs! repo.enc.edu/2026/03/13/a-s… #DiverseIntelligence #Microbiology #ScienceNews #biology #StentorCoeruleus #CellularCognition #STEM #ScienceTwitter #Research #SamuelGershman@ gershbrain.bsky.social

@FoggWriter Oh my God! Way deep into the heart, Vanessa and the mind. It has such beautifully important things to say about the cycle of things, and loss and beauty and art. The imagery is just wow. The lines too (mmm!.."it's always winter on the moon"). Love your work!

My latest story is now out in Lightspeed Magazine! It's inspired by Chinese myths of immortality plus a love for tea, and it's one of my favorite things that I've written yet. lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/lotus-…

Ahh, my flash story is on the top page of @ElectricLit now, which may be one of the coolest moments I've experienced as a writer 😱 electricliterature.com

In 1988, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa began to advocate “a rhizomatic world or ‘chaosmos’.” Earlier, in 1986, he had already articulated his own aesthetic as “an architecture of symbiosis,” a mutually encompassing relationship between the part and the whole. He affectionately cited the books of Arthur Koestler on Janus and on "The Act of Creation", in which the latter explained “holarchy” (an open hierarchical system with self-transcending tendencies) and “bisociation” (the “emergence of a new plane from two previously unrelated frames of consciousness”). Kurokawa also referred to the comparable work of the fractal geometer Mandelbrot and the physicist David Bohm, who had long insisted that the movement of a whole is inherent within each part. The part and the whole, Kurokawa concluded, “come together like the two-faced god Janus".

Sneak peek at our upcoming @MITPress Open Access volume, Embodied Intelligence, co-edited with Jennifer M. B. Fugate, Arsen Abdulali, and Josie Hughes (June 2026). This book represents a major transdisciplinary effort to rethink the boundaries of cognition and agency. Preview the Open Access volume here: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053495/… #EmbodiedIntelligence #CognitiveScience #ArtificialIntelligence #MITPress

How to be an instrument of kindness in a harsh world – George Saunders on unthinking the mind, unstorying the self, and the 3 antidotes to your suffering themarginalian.org/2026/01/20/geo…

Plums, Bamboo, and Orchid, by Yamamoto Baiitsu, 1834

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself." Basho Matsuo (images: Yumeji Takehisa)

"When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness." themarginalian.org/2026/03/07/nat…

“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” ―Jorge Luis Borges

Tenjiku Tokubei riding a giant toad, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 19th century

Our brains don’t discover the world, they construct it through prediction, argues Karl Friston. In this studio interview, Friston challenges our assumptions about how our brains build the world around us, and explains how perception, action, and consciousness emerge from the same underlying imperative: minimising surprise. Karl Friston is a neuroscientist and theoretical neurobiologist best known for developing the Free Energy Principle, a unifying framework for understanding brain function, perception, and action. Tap here to watch the full interview. iai.tv/video/how-brai…

you pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world

by Kazuaki Horitomo