Diagnosing the illnesses of historical figures is a strange activity. I’m not really sure I approve of picturing the dead in the blue light of a science unknown in their own times, as if they were wearing hospital robes and sitting on examining tables, legs dangling like small children in an adult…
Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…
Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…
Nearly every year, I attend a Christmas service, even though I'm Jewish. Every year, the officiant delivering the homily points out that Christmas occurs in winter, bringing us hope in dark hours. As he says, "Perhaps it is the winter of your life."
Nearly every year, I attend a Christmas service, even though I’m Jewish. Every year, the officiant delivering the homily points out that Christmas occurs in winter, bringing us hope in dark hours. As he says, "Perhaps it is the winter of your life."
French and German do not have words that correspond exactly with the English noun "mind," which emphasizes reason (it's derived from the Greek menos and Latin mentis). Before the 18th century, few people on the Continent read English, and when "mind" appeared in French translations, it usually…
French and German do not have words that correspond exactly with the English noun “mind," which emphasizes reason (it's derived from the Greek menos and Latin mentis). Before the 18th century, few people on the Continent read English, and when "mind" appeared in French translations, it usually…
As you've heard, it's healthy to exercise, socialize, volunteer and get enough sleep, to the point of extending your life. Now a new study indicates that reading books can keep you alive longer as well. So if that's your inclination in the heat of August and you have time at a beach or beside a…
New York
Fire Island, New York
Ask which domesticated animal is most like humans, and the answer comes quickly: “Dogs!” Like us, dogs live in hierarchical packs, thrive on affection, and are smarter than the average cow, sheep, or goat. Yet all this is also true of the pig.
Our fascination with the brain seems to come from a longing to make psychology more like a hard science and hence, we assume, more useful. Physics gave us electricity, skyscrapers, and the Internet. Chemistry gave us medicine and more fresh food. Psychology is still taking baby steps, designing…
How easily the small eludes the big. We say that bugs will inherit the Earth, as if it wasn’t theirs already. Bugs made the Earth. Long ago, tiny spineless creatures with legs arrived on the wet shoreline, probably to escape predators at sea, and made land habitable for plants. The simultaneous…
The fighting in Burma would be the longest campaign of World War II, under conditions so bad that the Japanese called the place jigoku—hell. Soldiers hiked across hot, dry plains one day and slogged through mud under pelting rain the next. They fought off blackflies, mosquitoes, ticks, and leeches,…
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade, wrote W. B. Yeats while living in London. Nearly a century later, Sylvia Plath, who kept hives with her husband, composed five poems about bees in the very same house. To these Londoners, bees…
Louis Sullivan, an early advocate of office towers, called rooms “cells,” meaning the cells of plants, not those of monks or prisoners. Plants inspire architecture, as do structures built by animals and insects. Call them nests, hills, reefs, hives, or something else—homes in nature efficiently use…
This volume is full of unexpected revelations, not for the squeamish, starting with the fact that the preferred plural of “octopus” is “octopuses,” not “octopi.” Octopuses, we learn, can lurch onto land and can change color and shape in seconds. After 272 pages in the company of these animals, they…
My mother, who admired Linus Pauling, kept three rows of bottles filled with vitamins and herbs in her kitchen, as well as stacks of newsletters with advice about “natural” remedies. She maintained an admirable figure on a low-fat, low-meat diet and enjoyed a full, happy life. So when she died of a…
Every Christmas I receive a charming letter from a college friend I’ll call Doug. Because we live far from each other, I have never met his three children. Reading his letters carefully, I could see that one child wasn’t flourishing as well as the others. So this past winter, when Doug and I met in…
David K. Randall begins this glide through dreamland with a quote from Aldous Huxley: “That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.”
Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford, confesses that when he began this book he was influenced by Easy Rider, which he had seen again for the first time in years, and was drawn to the aimless wandering of its three male characters. Sykes, too, wanders about a huge terrain: nothing…