So *why* is Baudelaire doing this interesting thing? I have some theories. Check the article out if you'd like to know more!

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Is it *surprising* that Baudelaire does this? Based on fascinating work by Lera Boroditsky, I think it is. 19th-century French paintings almost always present death as a woman (LA mort), whereas German ones almost always present death as a man (DER Tod). Baudelaire is doing something interesting. 3/

Together with the awesome and indefatigable Axelle Marcantetti, I trawled through the entire corpus of poems, and we ended up with some figures. Short version: Baudelaire does this gender mixing quite a lot. And there are some really striking instances!) 2/

The upside is that the world becomes alive with a host of invisible movement—it's bursting at the seams with change, uniqueness, variety, and freedom. An exciting vision!

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What follows from this? Well, there's no such thing as a fixed self: you too are changing. There aren't even life stages, neatly demarcated from each other: change is continuous. And there isn't a set of neatly categorized species, since evolution never ends. 2/