This article first appeared online in our “Symmetry” issue in May, 2014. On an evening in January A.D. 532, pandemonium broke out in the Constantinople Hippodrome, a U-shaped chariot…

2020 was a bad year for just about everything—except horror. Horror films were wildly popular on streaming platforms over the past year, and 2020 saw the horror genre take home its…

Joe Pettit is a person of contradictions. A lover of solitude who manages teams, an engineer who writes poetry and paints, a family man who spends several months a year on remote Antarctic…

Sparingly these days do I find myself thinking I’ve got some time to kill. Time has a way of making itself scarce. I’m like some Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, always scavenging…

You might think that to become a better person, you should squelch your inner demons, suppress your darker impulses. That’s not quite right, according to Columbia University psychologist…

Last year, I briefly ran an analogue dating service. I’ll never know what inspired me to start it—maybe my stable relationship had me missing the excitement of single life—but…

With Hamilton on my mind, I had a fanciful thought while reading the new book Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. The Founding Father, stressed and tired and focused…

People running through the streets in terror, stores being looted for supplies, and, of course, people eating other people. In World War Z, the film adaptation of Max Brooks’ successful…

Poker players like to brag they win with skill not luck. So do investment bankers. Scientists. And writers. Skill, we insist, is our ticket to success. Who can blame us? It’s a useful…

When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it…