10 Popular Nautilus Magazine Stories of 2017

**Dive in:** *From democracy-damaging media to willpower to the holographic universe, here are some of the most-read Nautilus stories of 2017.*Illustration by Irene Rinaldi

What did the unconscious part of the mind say to the conscious part? This isn’t so much the start of a science gag as a perennial scientific mystery—one that the novelist Cormac McCarthy, in his first-ever work of non-fiction, “The Kekulé Problem,” confronted in Nautilus this year. It was one of our most-read stories of 2017.

As the New Yorker put it, the essay is “studded with suggestive details about the anatomy of the human larynx, what happens to dolphins under anesthesia, and the origins of the click sounds in Khoisan languages.” The kind of story, in other words, that’s right up our alley.

Here’s that, plus a selection, in chronological order, of some of our other most-read stories of the year. From democracy-damaging media to willpower to the holographic universe, here they are:

Against Willpower

Willpower is a dangerous, old idea that needs to be scrapped.

— Carl Erik Fisher, February 2017

Raising the American Weakling

There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength.

— Tom Vanderbilt, February 2017

New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram

The universe could contain its vast volume within a surface.

— Brian Koberlein, February 2017

Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours.

— Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, March 2017