• Ian Frazier explains how he is not an idiot; rather, he is afflicted by idiocy, thank you very much.

• In The Guardian Colm Tóibín explores Henry James’s mistrust of marriage and the ways that antipathy is written into his stories. It’s not so simple as to say that James rejected love, though marriage in James’s fiction is rarely a matter of love, or if love is there, it is severely complicated and frequently compromised. James was fascinated by marriage, but he was also leery of its effect on an artist’s life. Marriage is pragmatic and worldly and creates concerns that have little to do with writing novels. That conflict was James’s, Tóibín explains, without his actually needing to be married to discover it:

All of his life as a writer, James worried about both the purity of his work and the making of money. It was as though he himself was a married couple. One part of him cared for the fullness of art, and the other part for the fullness of the cupboard. He sought both with stubborn, steadfast zeal. Sometimes when he realised that he could not achieve one without failing the other, he argued with himself. However, he seldom gave up trying to match them. He struck hard bargains with publishers and editors. His notebooks are full of hopeful jottings of ideas that might come to full fruition not only as works of art, but as objects that would take the measure, as he called it, of the great flat foot of the public.

The argument between moral and artistic principles and between commerce and art interested James deeply, and it might have been enough for him to intensify this argument in pure drama, make it as simple as the row between a husband and a wife over the publication of a book, or the direction of a career.

• Bringing together monogamy and idiocy, the reason ducks have really long, elaborate phalluses has little to do with competition between male ducks. Rather, it’s because female ducks irreducibly complexed evolved ways to deny males’ aggression. Belle Waring explains the idiocy. Girl ducks: 1; male biologists: 0.

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