A few years ago, at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, I chanced on a memorable chat with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. His spouse, the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, with…

Setting: Chesterfield High, an unusual school in the suburbs of Ohio.The teacher writes on the board:2, 3, 5, 7, ...How, he asks, do we complete this pattern?Now a student might say…

Footage of a mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to subvert the legal and peaceful transfer of power, filled many of us with horror. Underlying that response was…

In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other point of departure than this.” The word,…

I remember my grandfather commenting—wry amusement tinged with grim resignation—that what made him finally feel old was seeing his children reach middle age. I was a child then.…

In September, a writer for HBO’s Watchmen series, Cord Jefferson, was awarded an Emmy. I enjoyed the show’s first season, a sequel to arguably the best movie (and graphic novel)…

Most of us, most of the time, think and act as though there are facts about good and bad, right and wrong. We think the predatory behavior of Jeffrey Epstein was abhorrent, and that…

In the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous models are being used to predict the future. But as helpful as they are, they cannot make sense of themselves. They rely on epidemiologists and other…

The great mystery of consciousness is why matter lights up with felt experience. After all, we are composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun; the…

Several years ago, I climbed Mt. Washington in Nevada to see the oldest complex life forms on Earth. Typically found at elevations higher than 3,000 meters, bristlecone pine trees…