7 for Sunday

Fifty years on, the Wow! Signal still has no explanation — but now we know which nearby stars have planets in the habitable zone. Tutankhamun’s tomb survived thirty-two centuries perfectly sealed before western archaeologists arrived. And David Bowie, it turns out, only gets more interesting the further in you go.

Organisms are not machines, and training them like machines is ending. Your low back doesn’t know you just sat on a plane for four hours — but a few minutes on the floor will remind it. Somewhere underneath the walled gardens, the open internet is still just quietly running, the same as it ever was.

That famous line from Gladiator turns out to be a movie’s invention — but Marcus Aurelius got there anyway, in his own words, in the very last line he ever wrote to himself. Meanwhile, New York in 1906 sounds like an orchestra where every musician is playing a different tune. And Ashtanga yoga is not about the movement.

A teaspoon of soil holds a kilometer of fungal threads. The nearest star, at peppercorn scale, is thousands of miles away. A man loses all his old emails in France and feels, to his surprise, something close to relief. The video store had sections, and sometimes an employee who’d seen everything.