Facts So Romantic

On Facebook, iPhone messenger, and What’s App, conversation is often silent and devoid of body language. Emotions are condensed to icons on a screen: a happy face, a wink, or a kiss blown…

One of my favorite moments from the history of science comes from a man whose name may be hard to improve on: Robert Rathburn Wilson. In 1967, in the midst of the space race with the Soviet…

While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one of these…

The Lebanese-Canadian professor of marketing Gad Saad (both sound like “sad”) can readily defend evolutionary psychology against the charge that it’s a convenient, “just-so story.”…

As you look closer and closer at the world, you find more and more levels of organization. And at many of those steps, the view is fantastic. From butterfly wings to snowflakes, zooming…

Plastic is so pervasive that I sometimes forget it’s all around me—in toothpaste, in makeup, in clothes. But plastic is also omnipresent in places untouched by people, and one sobering…

It’s your last year of college and you’re trying to answer the dreaded question of what comes next. Whether your major once seemed incredibly broad or totally specialized, you’ve…

In 1939, the year Edwin Hubble won the Benjamin Franklin award for his studies of “extra-galactic nebulae,” he paid a visit to an ailing friend. Depressed and interred at Las Encinas…

Over 72 million Americans are obese—a condition associated with a plethora of negative health outcomes including diabetes, cancer, and heart problems. But Americans’ eating habits aren’t…

In his 2003 book, Being No One, Thomas Metzinger contends there is no such thing as a “self.” Rather, the self is a kind of transparent information-processing system. “You don’t…