Author: Marchelle Calnan

One evening last spring, I sat down at the American Museum of Natural History’s 85th annual James Arthur lecture, in New York, on the evolution of the brain. This year’s speaker was Richard Byrne, who studies the evolution of cognitive and social behavior, particularly gestural communication in the great apes, at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. He […]

A dispatch from the future of extreme sports.

Digestive Tract Bling: A bezoar mounted in gold filigree, from late-17th century India—now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. When you get right down to it, a body like ours is basically a bony scaffold that a strange collection of organs, interconnected by a complex entanglement of piping, hangs on. In some of these pipes, […]

An illustrated trip from smallest to biggest.

Sperm are the cheetahs of the microscopic world: Made of little more than molecular muscle and batteries, tipped with a payload of genetic information, they are optimized for speed. But to orient themselves before their epic, seven-inch sprint (it’s more impressive if you’re less than one three-thousandth that size), they first need to sniff out […]

The stories have become all too familiar in Japan, though people often do their best to ignore them. An elderly or middle-aged person, usually a man, is found dead, at home in his apartment, frequently right in his bed. It has been days, weeks, or even months since he has had contact with another human […]

By 1967, Vladimir Nabokov had published 15 novels and novellas and six short story collections. But as he told the Paris Review that year, “It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology”—the study and classification of butterflies—“and never written any novels at all.” […]

An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.

Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, dreamt about peering into minds. “A series of distorting prisms block the knowing of the other,” he wrote in Love’s Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, in 2012. “Perhaps in some millennium, such union will come to pass—the ultimate antidote for isolation, the ultimate scourge […]