Section
Science
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What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
Bringing story and social action back into the healing process is the unfinished work of addressing existential suffering.
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The Inventor of Nature
In 1869 the centennial of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was celebrated around the world, including in New York City, where bands and speakers gathered in Central Park to honor his legacy. He was hailed as the most brilliant explorer since Alexander the Great, a scientist equal in stature to Charles Darwin, and a genius who…
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Speaking in Science
Some of today’s most provocative scientific tools are being built to do science themselves. IBM’s Watson, for instance, is being developed to sift through data at volumes far exceeding the capability of any one human researcher. While we tend to accept what our computers say about data in numerical or other easily computable form, the…
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Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot device, from the Book of Esther to Fight Club. But what seems strikingly timely about the sleeplessness imagined by Karen Russell’s novella Sleep…
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Shallow Botany
A birth is a fine way to begin a novel, so it is not in itself a bad sign that Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, The Signature of All Things, opens with the delivery of its protagonist, Alma Whittaker. The scene echoes Gilbert’s earlier novel, Stern Men (2000), which also began with the birth of a…
