Comic by Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman, read the rest of it here

What do you see, a bird or a fish? Fascinating Atlantic article on how the brain works and image illusions- “According to University of Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark’s masterful 2013 summary of the state of cognitive science, this emerging idea about the brain is called the “bidirectional hierarchical network model.” It holds that every level of the brain is engaged in making predictions, so the expectation of seeing a house feeds down through the cortex to the eyes, which are then more likely to perceive a sloping roof instead of something else. But if something is amiss with the prediction, that information gets transmitted and the brain tries to find a better organizational paradigm for the visual input. Knowledge feeds perception and back again. There are loops everywhere strengthening and weakening according to how well they seem to reflect exterior reality” RT

Glorious read from the NYT about a meeting of two brilliant minds. “If you read the poems Akhmatova wrote about that night, you get the impression that they slept together, but, according to Ignatieff, they barely touched. Their communion was primarily intellectual, emotional and spiritual, creating a combination of friendship and love. If friends famously confront the world side by side and lovers live face to face, Berlin and Akhmatova seemed to somehow enact both postures at once. They shared and also augmented each other’s understanding.” RT

Chris Messina talks to Glamour about the future of the Danny/Mindy relationship. “That’s a good question. I’m excited. I think what we can do is, I hope it has kind of a Lucy and Ricky feel to it, where there’s such love, but they still don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. They still get completely annoyed with one another—bickering and fighting—but [have] constant love [for one another]. I think we have an opportunity to show our audience some really fun stuff about couples. It has been a show about dating, and I think the other characters will go on to date and have girlfriends and stuff like that, but I think it’d be fun to show a season of how [a relationship] looks for Mindy and Danny and the silly and crazy things they do together. I think we’ll pick up with seeing them in a good place, but still wrestling with being Mindy and Danny.” RT

Tagged: Anna Akhmatova, Chris Messina, Chris Messina interview, cognitive science, comic book heroes, Danny/Mindy, Danny/Mindy future, female characters onscreen, feminism, feminist satire, Michael Ignatieff, representation of women, Russian poet, Russian poetry, the human brain, the mind, The Mindy PRoject finale, The Mindy Project finale interview, TV romance, women in film, women onscreen, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman film