A few months ago, I conducted an early Thanksgiving experiment on myself. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on a lecture trip. My morning was free, and I took it to write two pages about…

Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor timed the exact number of seconds that Bethlehem Steel workers took to push shovels into a load of iron ore and then draw them out, maximizing time…

My brother Alex describes autism to me this way: “Imagine you’re blind, deaf, and you have no sense of touch, and you’re standing in a field, and someone is throwing footballs…

As someone who has studied and practiced family therapy for 37 years, I am repeatedly struck by a secret’s impact on a family. With the best intentions, parents often strive to protect…

Many subcultures revolve around secret codes—but none do it quite like computer hackers. In our peculiar corner of the world, everyone’s identity is masked by a codename, and the…

During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Voltaire called superstition a “mad daughter” and likened it to astrology. The leading thinkers of the time espoused reason and…

There are important life events that people tend to remember. Some of them are personal, like your first kiss; others are historical, such as where you were on 9/11. I remember my…

Your powers of attention: fooled!Attention is, by definition, limited. And that’s usually a good thing. If you’re searching for a lost earring on the floor, you want to ignore…

Tales about the origins of our species always start off like this: A small band of hunter-gatherers roams the savannah, loving, warring, and struggling for survival under the African…