• I happen to be reading the book this article is about just now... it's a good book about an important topic (animal intelligence) from the perspective of the scientific history of this topic. And this scientific history is interesting because of how much of it is marked by preconceptions and resistance to real scientific study of the subject... basically many who did study animal intelligence were accused of being unscientific simply because they did! There is plenty about the animals themselves in the book, as well as about the people who study them, so it's far from being a dry history, but it's a history first, which the NYMag article doesn't put across properly.