Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg…

Geniuses are a dying breed.And yet, they seem to be all around us. We live at a time when commentators speak without irony of “ordinary genius” and claim to find it everywhere.…

It’s easy to name science and math geniuses. I can just flip open my old book from the 1960s, which lists “100 Great Scientists”; it contains all the names you’d find on most…

The records of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, tell the tale of one John Randal, who was tried on Sept. 9, 1674. He was charged “with two Indictments, one for…

Among other pursuits, Simon DeDeo studies big things—those that are too big to experiment on. These include cosmology, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and human societies.…

By the time Cornelis Drebbel built an oven with a simple thermostat, one of the first manmade feedback mechanisms in history, in the 1620s, he was regarded in Europe as a magisterial,…

The lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to…

When the HMS Beagle dropped anchor on San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the Galapagos archipelago, in September 1835, the ship’s naturalist Charles Darwin eagerly went ashore…

Celebrated author Jared Diamond asks deceptively simple questions: “What do traditional societies do better than us?” “Why are some nations more resilient than others?” The…

Collecting grotesque and marvelous objects was a favorite pastime among genteel Europeans from the early modern period to the Enlightenment. Their curated “wunderkammern,” or “cabinets…