In the spring of 1964, as fighting escalated in Vietnam, several dozen Americans gathered to play a game. They were some of the most powerful men in Washington: the director of Central…

Ronald Perry can’t seem to get his patients’ teeth white enough. The Massachusetts dentist, who directs the Gavel Center for Restorative Research at Tufts University School of…

You can wear them as high-fashion jewelry, eat them in marshmallow form, and wrap your packages in duct tape branded with their likeness. Their cultural currency is so strong that,…

An hour into my interview about sex and love with Helen Fisher, she said, “You’re getting me to say a whole lot of things I never get to say.” Her tone wasn’t exasperation…

An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens…

I walk into Starbucks in Achrafieh, Beirut and feel all eyes on me. I tug at my top self-consciously, probably making things worse, and wonder a) do I look like an easy Westerner;…

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 Northwestern University economist Charles Manksi calls it the “reflection problem”: How can we know if person A is affecting person B, or the reverse? Without being in each…

Maegan Ayers and her then-boyfriend, Nathan Socha, faced a dilemma in the fall of 2009. They had found the perfect little condo for sale in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain:…

Kids love secrets. There’s something deeply exciting about trying to keep information from others—especially adults—whether it’s with a code from a cereal box or one invented…