Ideas | Evolution
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Chapter one
Recreation
Biology | Animals
How Sea Turtles Find Their Way
Whether you’re a sea turtle or a ship’s captain, you’ll need two tools—a map and a compass.
Biology | Evolution
Why It Pays to Play Around
Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us.
Chapter two
Refinement
Culture | Neuroscience
Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing
How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.
Culture | Neuroscience
Outwitting the Grim Reaper
Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on how to age successfully.
Ideas | Philosophy
Over Time, Buddhism and Science Agree
Understanding the impermanence of everything—including ourselves.
Chapter three
Reflection
Biology | Animals
The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming
Will the world now wake up to the global threat of zoonotic diseases?
Biology | Evolution
Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest
A story for my grandchildren about oxygen, evolution, and our planet’s fate.
Culture | Psychology
How a Nuclear Submarine Officer Learned to Live in Tight Quarters
You get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Ideas | Physics
Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious
Is it possible that all matter has some form of a mind?
Culture | Science Practice
You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends!
The trouble with academia.
Biology | Neuroscience
An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.
Chapter four
Regeneration
Culture | Sociology
Humans Have Gotten Nicer and Better at Making War
Historian Margaret MacMillan on what war reveals about human nature.
Biology | Animals
We Didn’t Evolve for This
A lesson from the animal kingdom on why COVID-19 is so deadly to humans.
Culture | Environment
Humans Have Rights and So Should Nature
An “Earth lawyer” argues for cultural transformation in environmental law.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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A Breakthrough in Measuring the Building Blocks of Nature
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Matter
We’re the Cosmic 1 Percent But Our Solar System Isn’t a Complete Weirdo
Is Earth unique? Once a grand philosophical question, it has, over the past two decades, become, with the discovery of thousands of planets around other stars—our cosmic cousins—a scientific…
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Matter
How to Talk Like a Physicist
The other night I was out on our street with the neighbors for a socially distanced hang. My two-year-old daughter, mistaking the only street light on the road for the moon, pointed at…
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Biology
Vaccines Are the Safest Medical Procedure We Have. Make Your Wager Wisely
In the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist Blaise Pascal, having undergone a religious experience that transformed him into something of a zealot, suggested the following…
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