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Some metaphors end up forgotten by all but the most dedicated historians, while others lead long, productive lives. It’s only a select few, though, that become so entwined with how we understand the world that we barely even recognize them as metaphors, seeing them instead as something real. Of course, why some fizzle and others […]

When Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, in The House of the Dead, that “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” he was talking about the cruelties and deprivations of life in Siberian prison camp. But the human tendency to adapt or “get accustomed” to situations is more profound than even Dostoyevsky may have realized. […]

Emily Temple-Wood has written approximately one Wikipedia article every ten days since she was 12 years old, totaling around 330. The work of the 21-year-old undergraduate, studying molecular biology at Loyola University of Chicago, unabashedly exposes sexism—and in the process, has exposed her to some of it. Temple-Wood’s output has made her the target of […]

Humans have marvelous powers of recognition. No one’s surprised when parents identify their child in a crowd by a glimpse of her face or echo of her voice. But we aren’t unique in this regard. Other creatures have evolved impressive powers of discrimination. Take birds. “Their recognition system is really quite remarkable,” says Mark Hauber, […]

You may like to imagine that your major life choices—where you live, who you marry, what you do for a living—are based on rational weighing of options. In your relationships, for example, you might seek someone that jives with your personality and shares your life interests, beliefs, and Netflix preferences. So the fact that you […]

Our veins are swimming with immune cells of many different kinds. Some bear the memory of previous infections, in case we should encounter them again; some are actively fighting invaders; others are merely on the look-out. Counting all of the varieties of cells and what molecules they are producing gives researchers a profile of someone’s […]

Imagine that, for once just for kicks, you decided to play the lottery and, not long after, you saw that the winning numbers were yours. You’re now millions of dollars richer. Do you think you’d be happier? Most of us think so. Now imagine that, instead of winning the lottery, you got into an accident […]

On a late fall morning, Joseph Alexiou fastened his life jacket and stepped into an eight-foot fiberglass boat floating on the Gowanus Canal. A licensed New York City tour guide, and an amateur historian, Alexiou was preparing to take a passenger on an unsanctioned tour of the waterway he’d spent three years researching for his […]

Just last month, Carmen Blandin had a remarkable dream. In it she saw, for the first time, not her old face in the mirror—the one she had for the first 38 years of her life—but the new face she received in a transplant three years ago. “I actually saw me with my new face,” she […]

To Hawaiian speakers, vowels reign supreme. Only eight consonants exist in the language’s 13-letter alphabet, so most of its meaning is derived from oohs and aahs, ohs and eehs. One might say Hawaiian sounds a lot like the sea that surrounds it; the bulk of its words are simple and spare, flowing smoothly from vowel […]