Human eyes perform … jiggles, more formally called “saccades,” in response to a change in the field of vision. Our eyes quickly scan the surroundings and then send the data to the brain. Youthful eyes jiggle regularly to take in new or unfamiliar stimuli. As the person attached to those eyes ages, the eye muscles grow slower and the pathways between the eye and the brain grow longer, more complex, or, in some cases, damaged. In all, this means the brain receives less input over the course of a day. But by a certain age, the brain has grown accustomed to a certain amount of stimuli, and the relatively small amount received in old age leaves a person with the feeling that a day has ended too soon.

There’s a handy trick for reading station signs that otherwise fly past in a blur as you travel in a high-speed train. Look at one side of the window and then immediately at the other side of the window. When you change your gaze, your eyes will automatically make a rapid jerking movement, known as a saccade. If the direction of the saccade is the same as that of the train, your eyes will freeze the image for a split second, long enough to read the station name if you time things right …. The image of the station name becomes visible because it is traveling at the same speed as the eye, and the images before and after the saccade are blurred and so don’t interfere with the image of the sign. This shows us that our vision is still working when our eyes move rapidly during saccades.

For those of us not observing Ramadan but are blessed to have friends who are, now is the time for an invitation to partake in a fabulous home-cooked feast. During the holy month which runs until the end of July, Muslims fast during the day, then break the fast at dusk with a lavish meal called Iftar. From a slow-cooked goat meat stew called Nihari to desserts flavoured with cardamom, pine kernels and apricots, Iftar is a feast for the senses. Families usually cook special Iftar recipes rarely found outside their homes. Most have been collected over generations, others are carved out of unique bonds and circumstance.

When Rida Hamida approached a mosque with the idea of breaking Ramadan fast with a taco truck, she faced a tough sell. When it comes to the evening iftar—the dinner Muslims share after a day’s fasting in Ramadan—the Muslim population in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, is accustomed to traditional Arabic and South Asian biryani meals, with rice and meat kebabs. But besides being immediately gratifying and accessible, Hamida thought, the taco would also bring Orange County’s Latino and Muslim communities together. So she made a proposal: She’d bring a taco truck to the mosque to serve halal tacos, while the mosque’s leader provided biryani.

Irish women writers, actors, painters, and journalists of the mid-twentieth-century socialised in a heady atmosphere of arty conversation and political raillery, and actively campaigned on issues which affected their rights as citizens. They hosted annual banquets to network with influential people in theatre and the media, invited writers (male and female) to their “at homes” to discuss art and literature, and publicly promoted the work of their members through a literary award system…

[Samuel] Coleridge was that rare thing, a conversationalist: eloquent, witty, with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of cultural knowledge. Nor was he the only one back then who could claim his company was a performance art. David Hume once engaged in so much raillery at a dinner party he left Jean-Jacques Rousseau clinging to a table leg.