After being a New Scientist reader for over four decades, a recent article on how web3 would save social media finally convinced me to cancel my subscription. Deep down, I'd known for a long time that their editorial standards had steadily eroded, and the feature on blockchain and the semantic web being, in some unexplained way, the solution for social media lock-in was the last straw.

But I needed another way to keep all three of my science neurons firing, so I switched back to Scientific American, a publication I'd last read in the 1990s. In addition to the magazine, I dug out this book I've meant to read for a couple of years. It is a collection of relatively recent articles from the magazine about the hard problem of consciousness.