In July 1925, Margaret Mead, a doctoral student at Columbia University, set off on a cross-country train journey with a young faculty member, Ruth Benedict. Mead was bound for the…

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…

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…

In the interplay between behavioral science and policy, puffs of smoke abound.Photo illustration by metamorworks / ShutterstockIn March the United Kingdom curiously declined to impose…

In Rush, author Stephen Fried confirms what earlier biographical writings on the doctor had observed: that history misunderstood him, “had not taken him seriously enough as a founder,…

Last summer, in the early days of a heat wave that would culminate in the highest temperatures ever recorded in Paris, I biked across the city to meet my friend Romain Graziani. At…

 Partly because people think of experts as oracles, as opposed to experimenters and exploiters of trial and error, there’s a presumption that either the experts know what is…

Sweden did not set out to kill thousands of its older citizens. Nor did any country as COVID-19 swept across the globe. But Sweden’s unique and closely watched approach to the pandemic…

Things have been different at the Tumwater Family Practice Clinic since COVID-19 came. Its patients in Washington state are being triaged over the phone, tested at the curbside, and…

Xu Jiao was anxious to get back in the gym. Living in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, she had gone through two months of lockdown. The pandemic hadn’t been particularly…