The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way…

Suppose a woman suffering a headache blames it on a car accident she had. Her story is plausible at first, but on closer examination it has flaws. She says the car accident happened…

When Ruth Behar moved from Cuba to Israel and then to a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, in 1962, she was shunted into the “dumb class.” There she met another challenged…

Our interactions with home are intimate, sustained, complex, and even physiological. We react to them not just with our rational mind, and our emotions, but also with our bodies. To…

When I returned to England, I knew that Antarctica had distorted my personality. The rolling green hills of Derbyshire, near where I grew up, looked different than I recalled. At a…

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…