The standard cultural framing of where animal life originated has, for most of the last century, placed the origin in shallow water.
A research team at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, led by Haim Cohen, has just published findings in Nature Communications that have, on close examination, produced one of the more striking results in aging research in recent years.
The cosmos, in any honest accounting, is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we are in it.
There is a particular kind of adult who is, by every external measure, warm. They are pleasant in conversation.
There is a particular kind of adult, more common than the wider culture has registered, who is by every external measure pleasant, kind, and reliable, who has…
The human skeleton is, on every available physiological measurement, considerably more dynamic than the standard cultural framing tends to credit.
Robin Williams said this line, or some version of it, in various interviews and public moments before his death in 2014. The line has, since, become one of…
Carl Sagan wrote this line, in a slightly longer form, in the introduction to Pale Blue Dot in 1994. The line has, since his death, become one of those quotes…
Brian Cox said this in one of his BBC documentaries, somewhere in the last fifteen years, with the particular quiet confidence he tends to deliver these kinds of lines with.
There is a particular kind of adult who can, in 2026, sit through a two-hour film without once reaching for their phone.
There is a particular kind of low-grade fatigue that almost every adult I know carries, and that almost none of them can identify the source of.
I have, by now, lost count of the number of times I have stepped out of an airport into a city that I had previously only encountered in films and felt, for the first hour or so, slightly dislocated in time.
There is a small social event I have been paying close attention to for about a decade now, because the event has turned out to be the most reliable diagnostic I have ever found for who, in any given conversation, is worth taking seriously.
Charles Bukowski wrote, somewhere in his enormous body of cantankerous late-career output, that the problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
There is a small social experiment one can perform in any large supermarket parking lot, anywhere in the world.
There has been a particular pattern in twentieth-century science fiction that the wider culture has not, on the available evidence, fully reckoned with, even…
