ISSUE #30: Beetle Mummy Teenagers
That's the name I would use for my bug-themed indie rock band IF I HAD ONE.
Not to start this post off with “I just read this great New Yorker article” but I just read this great New Yorker article from last August that I stumbled upon while looking for inspiration for today’s Bugstack (sometimes I literally google “insects” and see what comes up). The piece, “What Insects Go Through Is Even Weirder Than We Thought,” is written by Rivka Galchen and summarizes the recent research of entomologist James Truman, whose studies focus on insect metamorphosis. His team found, by studying the changes of fruit fly brains from tiny grub to adult, just how dramatically an insect’s neural pathways are rewritten once it completes its final, most complex physical change.
This entry, while not a “Bugs on Film” post like previous entries, was also inspired by a new and very good movie out this week, Rose Glass’s lesbian crime drama Love Lies Bleeding, in which Kristen Stewart falls in love with a girl bodybuilder played by Katy O’Brian. More importantly it’s about Ed Harris playing a guy who keeps giant beetles as pets. Multiple people who saw this movie before I did (rude) told me about this, and it is indeed true: there’s a scene where Harris lets a huge beetle crawl around on his palm.
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