I’ve never been in this position, but the person demanding a newspaper or magazine correction—the insider claiming he was quoted out of context; the scientist whose nuanced position didn’t come across, quite; the dead person who’s not really dead—must get a certain satisfaction from seeing the correction printed. It might be the grim satisfaction of…

A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson (Read Part I and Part II.) A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from…

A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson (read Part I here) A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South,…

A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the…

When I set out to write a book on all the great and hidden stories on the periodic table, I figured I’d have to delve into some strange and uncomfortable history. There was the inevitable brush with the alchemists, and humankind’s almost instinctual lust for gold and silver. I even ended up mapping out the…

In the middle of last month, a colleague of mine, a writer, was run over by a five-ton military truck on a public street in Washington, D.C. Patrons at a restaurant nearby—it was dinner time, about 6 p.m., a nice day to dine outside—said the sound of her getting crushed beneath the wheels was stomach-sickening.…

The news this week titillated chemists. And science aesthetes everywhere—those lovers of beauty, harmony, and order—should be just as excited that the periodic table has added its 117th element, ununseptium. But be prepared for disenchantment. For those of us that write about the periodic table for a living, the gap at 117 was doubly galling.…

by Sam Kean For those of us that like drastic solutions and saltational mutations, one way to fix the perpetual crises (existential, and otherwise) that colleges and universities seem to find themselves in would be this: get out the axe. Axe the business school, axe all the engineering programs, axe the professional programs, axe even…

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel” Holden Caulfield would probably have two hemorrhages if he heard someone say this, but it’s true that even for thoughtful and otherwise independent people it simply feels good sometimes to know you’re doing the exact same thing as thousands of…

This is your very breakable brain on NFL Sunday.I opened an otherwise innocuous copy of a magazine the other day, and my shoulders leapt up in a shudder. Couldn’t help it. I was being confronted by the snout of a tiger snake, a closeup snapped from a low angle, so that a good third of…

by Sam Kean The interviewer asked Bill Gates flat out: “Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking, incredible, and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft … If you had to…

by Sam Kean I’m hoping here, now, after a combined twenty-three months of their being dead, and two full months after the most recent death, that the statute of limitations has expired on de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and that I may be allowed to speak, if not ill of the dead, at least in…

Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” If nothing else, there’s reason to think this could be a contentious point among men and women of learning,…

Watching the legions of Michael Jackson fans make pilgrimages to and build cairns of flowers and stuffed toys at the Neverland Ranch in southern California, I can’t say I shared their sorrow exactly. I did sympathize: Boy, had I been there. When David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his own southern California home on September…

It was the “o” what did it, three swirling red crests with the vertiginous rabbit-hole center fading into white that hypnotized my attention and coaxed my bike tire left so that I nearly grazed the back wheel of a BMW. It was an encounter I would have lost, surely, and it surely would have been…

I. When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian. Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants…

One day back when I was living in Minneapolis, an ice-cream truck came trolling down our tree-lined street. Despite the dearth of children in the neighborhood, the squat beige van came not infrequently, usually tooting something innocuous like “Pop Goes the Weasel” to rally a small crowd. One blistering afternoon it started whistling a different…

It was my fault. I’d been traveling abroad and didn’t want the real world invading my vacation bubble, so I was checking e-mail and world headlines superficially. Bea Arthur’s death and swine flu penetrated my consciousness to about the same depth. Sometime during those lazy days I followed a link or two and saw a…

Gambling and science and story-telling have a complicated relationship. I have to admit upfront I’m biased: In my science days, I picked up some statistical reasoning skills, and even those modest skills were enough to more or less murder my fascination with gambling, a fascination tangled up with my (former) ability to fashion stories around…

On “the sequencing of the mathematical genome” Mathematics is funnier than it gets credit for, and the best laugh I ever had about math involved a friend in college and a course so intimidating he almost quit his mathematics major after hearing the name. “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” it was called, a title that betrayed…