Draw the draft

And for a few seconds, everyone forgets who is controlling whom.… The old theatre stood at the end of a narrow street in Osaka, squeezed between a concrete apartment building and a bicycle shop. Its sign was almost unreadable. Inside, however, everything was carefully maintained. The stage was only a few meters wide, but behind the curtain hung dozens of puppets—wooden figures with articulated shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, and fingers. Some had beautiful costumes; others were so old that the paint on their faces had begun to crack. Among them was a marionette named Ren. Ren had been made nearly forty years earlier by a craftsman who had believed that a puppet’s most important feature was not its face, but its balance. A marionette could have exquisite eyes and a beautifully painted mouth, but if its center of gravity was wrong, no amount of skill could make it appear alive. That principle fascinated Haruto, the theatre’s newest puppeteer. His teacher, ...

The conversation had already begun.… At a small equine training center outside Kyoto, a young trainer named Haru had an unusual habit. Every morning, before saddling the horses, she talked to them. “Good morning, Kaze. You slept well?” “Come on, Momo. We have work to do today.” The other trainers sometimes laughed. “You know they don’t understand Japanese, right?” Haru always smiled. “Maybe not the words.” Yet she continued. And strangely enough, the horses seemed to work better when she did. Modern research gives part of the explanation—but not the one Haru’s colleagues expected. Horses can learn particular human words through conditioning, and experiments have found that they can discriminate a taught word even when it is spoken by an unfamiliar voice. Human vocalizations directed at horses can also acquire consistent meanings within particular riding communities, while pitch, duration, and intonation alter how those sounds func...