What poetry and applied mathematics have in common
Remembering the novelist Reynolds Price
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question …
As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. As a novelist, she explored the separate but parallel lives of two influential 20th-century scientists: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true.
Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary
From 1915 until 1946, some 25,000 pieces of paper were exchanged between painter Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The correspondence tracks their relationship from acquaintances to admirers to lovers to man and wife to exasperated — but still together — long-marrieds.
There comes a time in every father’s life when he has to step back and let his children start thinking for themselves. You boys are getting older…
Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
Do we expect too much from our data?
Ok, that is it. I’m cutting the engines. We are not moving from this spot until one thing is made perfectly clear: Every single person…
Tummy trembles. Brain fuzz. That discombobulating feeling that you’re not quite sure what you should be doing, but you should be doing something to keep your…
Noticing Nature 
Anyone Can Learn to be A Polymath
What Students Really Need to Hear