Now in his seventies, Robert Trivers is no longer a prodigy but still acts the enfant terrible. He taught himself calculus when he was 14 and wrote and published a series of papers that revolutionized evolutionary theory when he was still a graduate student at Harvard. He was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of…
For almost as long as I can remember, bedtime was the time of day when I felt the least sleepy. As a small child, I would read by flashlight or listen to my transistor radio until the small hours of the morning. As a college student, I would stay up all night several times a week. Needless to say, this…
Rewire Me has run dozens of articles on people’s conscious journeys toward healthier, deeper, more spiritually attuned ways of living. I’ve written about religious experiences that are so powerful they seem to spontaneously rewire the whole person, transforming him or her into not just a better person but a completely new one. Such rebirths, I’ve noted, are often marked with…
On January 15, 1929, in the bedroom his parents shared in his grandparents’ house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Michael Luther King Jr. was born. No, Michael is not a typo. It wasn’t until 1934, upon his return from a globe-spanning journey that had taken him from Paris and Rome to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where he was a delegate…
In his new book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown Publishing Group), Mitch Horowitz tells the fascinating story of the “loosely knit band of psychical researchers and religious philosophers, mental-healers and hypnotists, Mesmerists and Spiritualists, Unitarians and Transcendentalists, suffragists and free-love advocates, black liberationists and Christian socialists, animal-rights activists and Biblical communists, occultists and Freemasons, artists and…
As long as 42,000 years ago, homo sapiens were making music—and not just chanting and beating on their chests. Millennia before Man-the-toolmaker figured out the principles of the wheel or the lever, he was carving finger holes in bird bones and hollowed-out pieces of mammoth ivory and blowing through them. Archaeologists have recovered some of these amazing artifacts in southern…
