Brian Gallagher

  Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Sure, Donald Trump usually isn’t one for heady or complex matters. His business roles—promoting steaks, golf courses, and casinos—haven’t been particularly rigorous, in an intellectual sense. The closest he came was with Trump University (although, among other problems, its use of the […]

On the last weekend in April, I was surprised that a panel called “The Press and President Trump,” held at the Columbia Journalism School, didn’t broach the subject of mental illness. Just over a week earlier, at a psychiatry conference at Yale, a group of the attendees announced that Trump has a “dangerous mental illness.” […]

 When Robbert Dijkgraaf was a little boy, growing up in the Netherlands, he’d play in his home attic after school, often with a friend. It was dark inside except for the light streaming in from one window. One time, they closed the shades so only a sliver of photons could pass through. Robbert, holding a […]

In Victorian England, one pastime among friends and family was to jot down your “Confessions”—answers to semi-serious questions of taste and principle. One day, in the spring of 1865, Karl Marx had a go. Several of his answers spotlight habits of the scientific mind. The quality you like best? Simplicity. The vice you hate most? Servility. […]

The “signal leakage” of our communications is becoming more and more scarce, not more abundant.Illustration by Danielle Futselaar / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Reports of U.F.O. sightings were commonplace in the 1950s. The C.I.A. recently came clean, on Twitter, concerning its role: “Reports of unusual activity […]

I can remember, almost a decade ago, when I was convinced out of my “Young-Earth” Creationism. It was almost a process of de-radicalization. During high school I was a generic Christian, but then some friends suggested I watch a video of a pastor online and, well, you can guess the rest. The message encouraged spreading […]

Siddhartha Mukherjee has an arresting thought experiment: What if, along with your familiar elementary-school report card, you had a genetic report card—one that read out your propensity for getting each letter grade in each subject? If you get an A in math, and your genetic report card says that your propensity for getting that grade […]

After a visit from one of his patients in March, 1966, the psychiatrist Maurice Heatly noted, “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility as he initiated the hour with the statement that something was happening to him and he didn’t seem to be himself.” Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in […]

Last week, Marco Rubio, a United States senator from Florida, found himself in an unfamiliar position. He felt compelled to remind his more senior colleagues in the Senate of the value of rational debate. Word of this didn’t really catch on until The Washington Post, two days later, ran the headline: “Marco Rubio just gave […]

It’s a subtle point, but the British comedian Ricky Gervais was not quite right when he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show yesterday, “Science is constantly being proved all the time.” Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Perhaps he misspoke. He was put on the defensive. Colbert, an […]