When it debuted in 2024 on the now defunct BET+, this uproarious series introduced many viewers to two Diarras: Diarra Kilpatrick, the show’s whip-smart creator, and Diarra Brickland, the character she plays: a divorced schoolteacher who turned amateur detective after refusing to believe she’d been ghosted by a dream Tinder date. A Season 2 jump to Paramount+ finds the character once again letting her Scooby Doo–like nose for mystery lead her into danger. This time, a simple treasure hunt puts her in the middle of a gang war and triple homicide investigation. 

Wednesday, July 29, Paramount+

by Lixing Sun

Birds lay eggs, bees pollinate flowers, and for as long as anyone remembers, humans have been using such examples to introduce their children to the subject of sex, said Elle Hunt in New Scientist. But as any expert in the field would know, “the birds and the bees analogy just doesn’t capture the diversity, drama, and strangeness of animal reproduction.” In Lixing Sun’s “engaging” new book, the Central Washington University biologist shows an “infectious” enthusiasm for detailing the many ways that life on Earth multiplies itself, starting with asexual reproduction as practiced even by some sharks and condors and extending to mallard ducks’ corkscrew vaginas and penises. “But as the title suggests, Sun’s scope is far more ambitious,” taking on such big questions as why sex exists at all. And even when Sun writes as if all his readers know evolutionary biology as well as he does, “the book remains interesting because the many examples of kooky animal sex make it a pacy read.” 

Credit recent findings that have upended biologists’ understanding of sex and its history, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. The new body of research “has given rise to a new sort of natural-history book, one so racy that it would have made Charles Darwin raise a bushy eyebrow.” Sun’s contribution to the field opens by reminding us that, because asexual reproduction is more efficient, it’s still not settled what evolutionary purpose sex serves. The theory known as Muller’s ratchet holds that sex counters the buildup of dangerous genetic mutations. The Red Queen hypothesis posits instead that sex helps species stay one step ahead of parasites, and the “wonderfully named” Vicar of Bray hypothesis posits that it helps species adapt quickly to environmental change. “All of these theories have a certain appeal, yet all have been found wanting.”

“Whatever the reason, it is sex that has created the complexity of our world,” said Adam Weymouth in The Times (U.K.). As Sun plays usher, he sometimes anthropomorphizes the sex lives of other creatures, going so far as to speak of single-cell organisms engaging in “flings.” Such playfulness “can end up somewhat trivializing the material,” and where his book “really becomes sticky” is in its attempt to invoke biological imperatives to explain certain human behaviors, including sexual violence. But he does score points when he highlights the fluidity of gender identities and gender roles in the animal kingdom and recommends that we accept, as any pregnant male seahorse might, that there aren’t fixed rules in nature about what it means to be male or female. “The world is complex beyond our comprehension,” and “when it sticks to the science,” The Origin of Sex is “an enlightening study.”

The pioneering aviator who set a space record

Wally Funk waited over 60 years for a few fleeting moments of weightlessness. An accomplished pilot, she longed to go to space from the moment in 1960 when she heard of a private program that put female pilots through the same astronaut fitness tests that the men were taking. At 22, Funk was the youngest of the Mercury 13, the group of women who passed the grueling physical challenges, and she was one of just two to go through two more phases of testing, including spending over 10 hours in an isolation tank. NASA didn’t sanction the program, though, and it barred women from astronaut training. Funk wouldn’t reach space for another six decades. In 2021, at age 82, she joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his rocket company Blue Origin’s first crewed flight. At the time, she was the oldest person to reach space; Funk remains the oldest woman to do it. The spacecraft took her up over 60 miles to the edge of space in a flight that lasted just 10 minutes. Back on land, she spread her arms and said, “I want to go again, fast!”

Mary Wallace Funk grew up in New Mexico with parents who encouraged her daring exploits. At 5, she leaped from her barn’s roof in a cape and crashed into a haystack. “Her fascination with flying was undiminished,” said The New York Times, and while attending Oklahoma State she earned licenses to fly planes, gliders, and seaplanes. At age 20, she became the first female flight instructor at a military base— commercial airlines wouldn’t hire her, using the pretext that their facilities lacked a women’s bathroom— and later became the first female safety inspector for the U.S. government, investigating some 450 crashes. Yet “hanging over these accomplishments was her unfulfilled dream of becoming an astronaut,” said The Guardian. She applied four times, but by the time Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle in 1983, Funk was 44 and considered too old.

Still, she continued astronaut training on her own, alongside her pilot career, “undergoing centrifuge tests, entering a high-altitude chamber, and visiting a Russian training site to experience zero-gravity conditions,” said The Washington Post. She ultimately logged 19,000 hours flying, taught over 3,000 pilots, and took part in numerous flying competitions. “They said, ‘Wally, you’re a girl, you can’t do that!’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Guess what: Doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’”