And how the brain is like a colony of ants

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In his classic book On Liberty, the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill urged that man strive to become “a progressive being.” Mill defined progressivism as the cultivation of individuality;…

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From observational notes cited in “Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography of Advertising Response in the Family Living Room,” by the Australian researchers Laknath Jayasinghe and Mark Ritson, in the June…

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From “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” by S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, Rebecca Roache, published last year in Ethics, Policy & Environment. A widely cited report by the United Nations…

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In 1755 the naturalist Stepan Krasheninnikov observed the Amanita muscaria mushroom’s effects on Russian soldiers in Siberia ingesting it for the first time. Claiming to have been seized by an…

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The smell of life and death — and everything in between

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From a June 7, 1923, letter sent to the personal secretary of Leon Trotsky, then Russian minister of defense, by the Nestle Laboratory for Hair Research in New York City,…

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Living with the mystery of headache

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Why we still fear vaccines

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