GarethCook

Opportunity, from "The Lives They Lived, 2019"

The New York Times Magazine

Her life began with a harrowing delivery. Cradled in the protective shell of a landing craft, she arced through the atmosphere at more than ...

Raj Chetty's American Dream

The Atlantic

Raj chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of ...

Maryam Mirzakhani

New York Times Magazine

Maryam Mirzakhani was a mathematician, but she worked like an artist, always drawing. She liked to crouch on the floor with large sheets of paper, ...

Policing With No Tickets

New York Times Magazine

THE TEMPTATION IS the greatest on nights when the evening rush seems to congeal around the car, and she just wants to be home. She ...

What Josephine Del Deo Saved for Us

New York Times Magazine

One day in the summer of 1953, Josephine Couch went with her boyfriend, Salvatore Del Deo, on an overnight trip to the dunes outside Provincetown. ...

Review: There Are No New Ideas, Only Rediscoveries

New York Times Book Review

RETHINK The Surprising History of New Ideas By Steven Poole 342 pp. Scribner. $26.

Around 1900, a century before Tesla’s Model ...

Air Assault

New York Times Magazine

A winter gale enjoys an easy approach to Manhattan from the north-northeast. As the wind moves over the Hudson River, the waves put up a weak ...

Learning From the Lazarus Effect

New York Times Magazine

For years, Grace Silva had experienced odd episodes with her throat — bouts of swelling and radiating pain that seemed to resolve with antibiotics — ...

The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

New York Times Magazine

This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence ...

Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain

New York Times Magazine

In 2005, Sebastian Seung suffered the academic equivalent of an existential crisis. More than a decade earlier, with a Ph.D. ...

Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style

Mind Matters

Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The ...

Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics

NewYorker.com

Near the end of 1861, with the American Union crumbling, President Abraham Lincoln became obsessed with an unusual document. Nearly three feet in length, it ...

What About Denise?

NewYorker.com

In 1991, the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi was honored with the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was widely considered a ...

A New Way to do Nuclear

NewYorker.com

In February of 2010, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, two M.I.T. students, were sitting on a bench in a soaring marble lobby under the university’s ...

Why We Are Wired to Connect

Mind Matters

When we experience social pain — a snub, a cruel word — the feeling is as real as physical pain. That finding is among those ...

Doubting 'Darwin's Doubt'

NewYorker.com

In the eighteen-eighties, workers carving a path for Canada’s first transcontinental railway began to notice odd creatures in the rocks. A geologist working for the ...

Brain Games are Bogus

NewYorker.com

  A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost ...

The Nocebo Effect: How We Worry Ourselves Sick

NewYorker.com

Many of us hope to find Wi-Fi wherever we go, preferably for free. But some people devote their lives to avoiding Wi-Fi altogether. Sufferers of ...

Autism Inc.

New York Times Magazine

When Thorkil Sonne and his wife, Annette, learned that their 3-year-old son, Lars, had autism, they did what any parent who has faith in reason ...

Review: There Are No New Ideas, Only Rediscoveries

New York Times Book Review

RETHINK The Surprising History of New Ideas By Steven Poole 342 pp. Scribner. $26.

Around 1900, a century before Tesla’s Model ...

The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

Mind Matters

We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun.  In The Self-Driven Child, authors William ...

The Secret behind One of the Greatest Success Stories in All of History

Mind Matters

In thinking about the state of the world, it is easy to see the signs of backsliding, and to feel at least a little despair. ...

The Dark Side of Happiness

Boston Globe

You can be happy starting today! Don't sit by any longer, while friends and co-workers enjoy the good life. Happiness is yours for the taking: ...

Modern psychology's God problem

Boston Globe

THINK ABOUT something that is very important to you. Like the ability to walk, or your vision. Now carefully visualize an entire day without it. ...

Untangling the Mystery of the Inca

Wired

Incan civilization was a technological marvel. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, they found an empire that spanned nearly 3,000 miles, from present-day Ecuador ...

Beehive management

Boston Globe

FOR THOSE interested in doing a better job of managing people - supporting them, inspiring them to greatness - there is plenty of advice out ...

Opportunity, from "The Lives They Lived, 2019"

The New York Times Magazine

Her life began with a harrowing delivery. Cradled in the protective shell of a landing craft, she arced through the atmosphere at more than ...

The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

New York Times Magazine

This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence ...

Learning From the Lazarus Effect

New York Times Magazine

For years, Grace Silva had experienced odd episodes with her throat — bouts of swelling and radiating pain that seemed to resolve with antibiotics — ...

Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain

New York Times Magazine

In 2005, Sebastian Seung suffered the academic equivalent of an existential crisis. More than a decade earlier, with a Ph.D. ...

Doubting 'Darwin's Doubt'

NewYorker.com

In the eighteen-eighties, workers carving a path for Canada’s first transcontinental railway began to notice odd creatures in the rocks. A geologist working for the ...

A New Way to do Nuclear

NewYorker.com

In February of 2010, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, two M.I.T. students, were sitting on a bench in a soaring marble lobby under the university’s ...

How Crowdsourcing is Changing Science

Boston Globe

At the end of the 19th century, a team of British archeologists happened upon what is now one of the world’s most treasured trash dumps. The ...

Do Plants Think?

Mind Matters

How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz, director of ...

Why Scientists are Boycotting a Publisher

Boston Globe

THE SCIENTIFIC community finds itself at the beginning of its own Arab Spring. At stake are values that all Americans hold dear: the free flow ...

Desperate parents chase a stem-cell miracle

Boston Globe

This article was part of a series recognized with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. Additional information on EmCell is available here. SUTTON — Many ...

What Josephine Del Deo Saved for Us

New York Times Magazine

One day in the summer of 1953, Josephine Couch went with her boyfriend, Salvatore Del Deo, on an overnight trip to the dunes outside Provincetown. ...

Why Japan Surrendered

Boston Globe

What ended World War II? For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan's surrender. By the ...

Untangling the Mystery of the Inca

Wired

Incan civilization was a technological marvel. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, they found an empire that spanned nearly 3,000 miles, from present-day Ecuador ...

Did the Solutreans settle America first?

Boston Globe

===== IMPORTANT NOTE. In the years since I first wrote this, the "Solutrean" hypothesis has been widely and convincingly rejected by archeologists. See here for ...

Why Do Nations Fail?

Boston Globe

SEVERAL CENTURIES ago, there was a nation that rose to become a world power on the strength of its innovation and its dedication to capitalist ...

History and the Decline of Human Violence

Mind Matters

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, is the author of the best-selling books, “How the Mind Works,” and “The Blank Slate.” But ...