Brian Gallagher
Should We Terraform Mars? Let’s Recap
Elon Musk wants to engineer Mars’ atmosphere. Can he?
So Can We Terraform Mars or Not?
Elon Musk wants to engineer Mars’ atmosphere. Can he?
The Heart of Musical Experience Is Expectation
In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano into a patient’s room. It’s a delightful moment: The patient is a musical savant named Patrick, played by the musician Dave Matthews—a painful muscle contraction in his hand, suffered during a performance, brought him in. […]
A Better Way to Cancel Noise
The other day I stepped into my apartment elevator and saw a neighbor of mine joking around with a construction worker. “You know what you do with these guys?” my neighbor said to me. He grabbed the construction worker by his bright-colored vest and pretended to shove him out the door. For the past few […]
Forget Everything You Think You Know About Time
A theoretical physicist challenges our common notions about the fourth dimension.
How Genes Refract Chance
The geneticist Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the influence of modern genetics on our ideas of chance and fate.
Should We Let English Eat the World?
Hideo Kojima is the Japanese creator of the 2015 video game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. He evidently chose “phantom pain” as a subtitle because he thought it captured the experience of being exiled, so to speak, from one’s first language. Kojima hints at its importance from the start of the game, with […]
Bo Burnham and the Illusion of Meritocracy
In a WTF with Marc Maron podcast episode from 2012, musical comedian Bo Burnham said his fortune felt unreal, as if his life were a futuristic VR game. “I could die, take off a helmet, and, look: It’s the Bo Burnham 2000. There’s a whole line of people crying waiting in line,” he told Maron. […]
The Biggest Misapprehension About Human Origins
Archaeologist Ticia Verveer recently posted a thread on Twitter showing that customer complaints go way back. And I mean way back. Verveer referred to a letter inscribed on a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. In the letter, Verveer writes, “The copper merchant Nanni details at length his anger at a sour deal, and his dissatisfaction with […]
Why Enceladus’ Ice Is Part of the Climate Change Conversation
To imagine the absence of the Arctic and Antarctica produces something like the opposite of sublime, a pang of emptiness and a longing to appreciate that terrain in person before it passes.Image by NASA / Wikicommons Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s sixth-largest […]