It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties.…

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was in many ways an enemy of the unlikely. The quintessential empiricist of his age, Hume’s 1748 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,…

To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences…

The history of science is punctuated with medical breakthroughs that seemed unlikely in the times from which they arose. Infections from simple cuts or sore throats laid waste to millions…

Finding regularity in nature is the bread and butter of science. We know that reptiles lay eggs, while mammals bear live young; the Earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days;…

Travels Looking at Mt. Fuji, by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)It doesn’t take advanced technology to prove that we live relatively circumscribed lives. Like tiny planets, we process…

Trudging through the mire of midtown Manhattan in the middle of a July heat wave makes you long for relief from your earthly trials—and at the corner of 8th Avenue and 37th Street…

The job in the North was a good job for what it was. I was not excited about it, but I was satisfied because it would take me away from the city where I had lived with Paul, and where…

It’s 2077 in the city of Vancouver, now part of the North American Union, run by a “Corporate Congress.” Technically, everyone is still free and enjoys the fruits of a highly…

The Continent hungers to be realized. Each day adds a new increment to the frontier,” I said, “and behind that expansion is the flux of towns darkening into cities to be threaded…