Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.


Every cat owner knows this: whenever something new is brought into the house, your cats have to examine it carefully. Give it a sniff. Jump on top of it. Circle around from all sides. It’s standard feline behavior. But check this out. I’m temporarily using a little clip-on speaker on my PC, and on Friday I got tired of looking at the wires so I moved it a couple of feet and stuck it on top of my external hard drive.

Thanks to the evil dex, I was sitting downstairs reading at 3 am when Hopper cruised in. She looked around a bit and then made a beeline for the speaker. She jumped up on the desk, got up on her hind legs and gave it a thorough sniffing. She circled around to the side to take another look. Then she went into the kitchen, hopped up on the counter and came up to it from behind to check it out some more. The whole operation took nearly five minutes.

That’s really pretty impressive. This is a small, gray plastic box. Hopper doesn’t interact with it or sleep on it. It has no odor. It had only been moved two feet. And yet, her mental image of this room was so precise that she immediately noticed the change and spent quite a bit of time checking it out. If cats don’t always seem very bright, maybe it’s just because they’re filling their brains with precision maps of the world.

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate