Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s sMars simulation, reflects on her year-and-a-day “off-planet,” six months in.
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The Magic of Archives: A Reading List
Stories about the importance and changing role of archiving—an oft-misunderstood or overlooked science.
The Family That Would Not Live
What can haunted houses and their history tell us about American history and culture? Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
A Conversation With Dan Ariely About What Shapes our Motivations
Dan Ariely on building an understanding of how humans behave from the ground up.
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
How women writers and artists, from Virginia Woolf to Sophie Calle, found inspiration and freedom by navigating cities on foot.
Beautiful Nowheres: ‘No Man’s Sky’ and the 500th Anniversary of ‘Utopia’
Five centuries after Thomas More’s classic was first published, we still dabble in perfect-world-building.
On Female Friendship and the Sisters We Choose for Ourselves
Essayist Chloe Caldwell on the “sisters” we choose for ourselves, and her close relationship with her surrogate younger sister, Cheryl Strayed’s daughter Bobbi.
Who Gets to Be a Genius? A Reading List
Why does it often take decades, even centuries, for work by women to be “discovered” and appreciated?
‘See What Y’All Can Work Out’: The State of Empathy in Charleston
Charleston’s—and our nation’s—systemic racism, through the lens of the Dylann Roof trial.
Understanding the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ of Error
The human lapses that occurred after the computerized ordering system and pill-dispensing robots did their jobs perfectly well is a textbook case of English psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of error. Reason’s model holds that all complex organizations harbor many “latent errors,” unsafe conditions that are, in essence, mistakes waiting to happen. They’re like a forest […]
