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…

The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known affectionately for being called a “magnificent erection” by, before he…

Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the tulpa will start talking back.Photo Illustration…

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…

On Jan. 1, 2021, five long years after the vote for what’s become known as Brexit, and numerous marches before and after that national decision, some of which attracted more than…

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years ago. At first, archeologists assumed he’d…

Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human notion of time was based on the natural rhythms of nature. Time was…

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in July, 2020.Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in…

Some evolutionary biologists say that after we pass reproductive age, nature, like a cat who’s been fed, is done with us. The bodily systems that thrived and repaired themselves…

The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, to see a retrospective…