A wonderful New Year short story by Ali Smith. I heard it on Classic FN.

Mini documentary by the New York Times about the last remaining speaker of Taushiro, a language that was spoken by a tribe that lived in the jungles of the Amazon basin in Peru.

Lies. A short story by JM Coetzee.

Why write fiction in 2017?

Überrascht, verwirrt und beglückt. German author Clemens Setz visits the Netherlands.

Wer wissen will, wie man in der Diskussion über kulturelle Identität vernünftiger argumentieren kann, sollte das Buch des französischen Philosophen Francois Jullien lesen. "Einer seiner zentralen Vorschläge lautet schlicht, nicht mehr in Unterschieden zu denken, sondern in Abständen. Und, in einem zweiten  Schritt, nicht mehr von kultureller Identität, sondern von kulturellen Ressourcen zu sprechen."

Super Goethe. Review of Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski, best known for his monographs on Heidegger, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

What bullets do to bodies. Profile of Amy Goldberg, a trauma surgeon based at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, one of the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the US, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome.

A brief history of humans trying and failing to understand the minds of apes.

Anthony Gottlieb on the correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. "She saw that his account of causal interaction between a material body and a nonmaterial mind conflicted with his defence of the mechanical philosophy."