Issue_23

The precariousness of game theory.

Can the spectacle of crashing dominoes shock people out of old habits?

Sodapix/Getty When philosopher Nicolas Malebranche peered at a fetus floating in a glass jar, in a shop of curiosities in Paris in 1672, he blamed its monstrous shape on the mother. At the time it was believed that a mother could deform her fetus simply by looking at something vivid. Malebranche had heard that this […]

Tommy George and the Agents of SHIELD shot a Nerf ball and erased a whiteboard.

Screen capture of Patty Bullion’s “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes” Facebook page. On April 27, 2011 a monstrous EF5 tornado traveled 132 miles across northern Alabama and into southern Tennessee, missing one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plants by less than two miles, and also skirting the grounds of […]

A group of Hasidic Jews walking the streets of Brooklyndiluvi.com Anna i Adria via Wikipedia In 1983, Yosef Eckstein an ultra-orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, had reason to be happy: His wife had just given birth to their fifth child. But the couple’s happiness was short-lived: The child was soon diagnosed with Tay–Sachs disease, […]

For many people, 1969 felt like a year when technology could solve all of our problems, a sentiment that reached a crescendo with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But back on Earth, Michael Kaback was a faculty member in pediatrics1 at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and he was frustrated. Kaback had helped some of his […]

A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

Artistic appreciation is a deeply subjective process, perhaps the most essentially personal thing that humans do. But are there some explanations for why we like what we do? Why, for instance, does a particular song get popular?Some of it has to do with the quality of the music—and by quality, I mean that there’s something […]

Coming back to life after losing my first child.