Cabinet 25: Insects

The sheer numbers are staggering: scientists estimate that at any one time there are ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on the earth, the group's more than 900,000 different known types accounting for some 80 percent of the world's total species. Yet despite the ubiquity of insects, our knowledge about their true character and extent is riddled with gaps--many experts believe that for every one insect species that has been described and cataloged by entomologists, as many as 30 others remain unidentified and unstudied. Cabinet 25 includes interviews with Eugene Thacker on swarming and with Deborah Gordon on colony organization, J.B.S. Haldane on the reasons why insects are thankfully small, George Pendle on Virgil's elaborate funeral for his pet house fly, Margaret Wertheim on insect vision, Viktoria Tkaczyk on Robert Hooke's flea and Steven Connor on the cultural history of the fly. Plus, an interview with food historian Harold McGee, Frances Richard on U.S. government standards for fruits and vegetables, Sina Najafi in conversation with accent coach Sam Schwa, Sandy Zipp on the aphorisms carved into rock by auto-didact John Samuelson, Louis Kaplan on Arthur Mole's "living photographs" and Joshua Glenn on the semiotics of the Coca-Cola bottle.