A professor of psychology at Barnard, Alexandra Horowitz is the director of that school’s Dog Cognition Lab. What we particularly admire about her: she is one of a very few scientists who can write about current ideas in her field in a way that a lay audience finds not only comprehensible—dayanu—but intriguing, which she did to great effect in her book Inside of a Dog: What dogs see, smell and know, and more recently in On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes.

• PERSON: Jakob von Uexküll, a German biologist and pioneer in animal cognition
• PLACE: “Glycol to go-devil,” a box of 3×5 cards of word citations she worked with as a lexicographer—”definer”—for the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• THING: 1964 Volvo 122