A father’s successful struggle 
to spare the son who killed the rest of the family highlights how Texas, historically America’s top executioner, is moving 
away from the death penalty 
to reflect a national trend.   With... Read More

Meet Sally and Ann. Sally has a basket. Ann has a box. Sally puts a marble inside her basket and goes outside to play (where she can no longer see her basket). While Sally is... Read More

The 2006 Humanist of the Year doesn’t need rose-colored glasses to see what’s clear about humanity’s progress. STEVEN PINKER is a cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, popular science author, and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department... Read More

Excerpted from Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre, published by The MIT Press, March 2018. Copyright: 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.   “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the... Read More

"Oh help me, please doctor, I’m damaged/There’s a pain where there once was a heart,” Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger sings on the band’s 1968 song, “Dear Doctor.” But, alas, it’s more than a... Read More

At a cocktail party recently, I met an unemployed mathematician/computer programmer. We talked about real estate, and then she told me how she’d gotten rid of a squirrel that was nesting in her attic, but... Read More

On the day before Thanksgiving, 1994, the US General Services Administration sent one of its staff carpenters, a man named Richard Lyons, to check out a block of vacant buildings it had acquired on a... Read More