A member of the psychology department at Hunter College, Diana Reiss is an expert in dolphin cognition who has conducted ingenious experiments to demonstrate that these creatures recognize themselves in mirrors: that they are self-aware. She is, incidentally, our first guest to postpone her visit until she returned from a marine mammal conference which, I was bereft to learn, was about marine mammals, and not attended by marine mammals, drunkenly carousing.

I am sadder but wiser.

• PERSON: Circe, a dolphin (not this one)
• PLACE: a cove in Taiji, Japan
• THING: a two-way mirror

• RANDY’S THING: bicycle pain