Facts So Romantic

In the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, a burly custodian in an orphanage basement, hunched over a chess board, intrigues a nine-year-old girl named…

One day in 1787, Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where the founders were debating the shape of a new government. He was confronted by Elizabeth…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Our sense of time may be the scaffolding for all of our experience and behavior, but it is an unsteady and subjective…

Imagine you’ve moved into a new neighborhood. You and your new neighbor, Jack, quickly build a friendly rapport and, after a couple weeks, you give him a set of keys, in case of emergency.…

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old…

The internet doesn’t agree on much these days. But there is one indisputable fact: Baby Yoda is absolutely adorable.For the uninitiated, Baby Yoda is an infantile alien and the breakout…

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist distinguished by his rock-solid scientific work and romantic yearning to understand consciousness. He recently closed an essay by wondering: “What is…

Last year I was in San Francisco, a city known for its tech companies, steep hills, and fierce winds. Each day I’d run around the neighborhood and up through the park, ending with a spectacular…

During the pandemic, I’ve been participating in weekly Zoom calls with former Peace Corps Volunteers who served with me in Nepal during the late 1960s. As among so many of my other friends,…

One of the weirdest things about our human experience of the world is how remarkably narrow it can be. We’re equipped with some extraordinary senses for sure. Our visual system can discriminate…