Morton Prince—physically hale, philosophically heterodox, ethically uncompromising, and psychologically splintered—epitomizes a classic New England character at its sunset hour. Indeed, Prince’s fiery conviction that he could make all his contradictory elements hang together makes his own psychology as fascinating as that of the patients...

Story, a spoken or written account of connected events, is one of the main ways we communicate with other people. Whether it’s reading a picture book with a child, watching a movie, listening to a podcast, gossiping over a cup of coffee, or daydreaming about...

Few ideas command more universal agreement than the belief that children must be protected. Across cultures, religions, and political traditions, they are regarded as uniquely deserving of care, safety, and opportunity. Yet a glaring contradiction emerges when we look closely at the conditions under which...

If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping their lives. It is not the only factor, but it is the most consistent one—structuring access to health, education, safety, and...

This piece explores human consciousness as the foundational engine of culture, tracing its evolution from early social learning in infants to the sophisticated shared meanings of prehistoric human communities. It examines how social consciousness—joint attention and reciprocal mirroring—enabled humans to transmit knowledge, develop language, and...

Editor’s Note: This article, by nature of the topic, may include language that is considered sensitive and/or vulgar to some readers. ...

Imagine that you notice an unfamiliar male face out of the corner of your eye. You turn to look at it, but it turns out that you perceived a face-like visual cue—a tree adorned with several hollows that appear like “eyeholes.” ...

The United States is in the grip of a reading recession—nearly half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023, and fewer than half read even one, according to data from YouGov and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Since the...

Sherlock Holmes, the famous fictional detective, believed that his brother, Mycroft, could also have been a brilliant solver of crimes if he had not been so impossibly lazy. Mycroft was large and slow-moving, and he avoided all unnecessary exertion. He enjoyed sitting by a window...

Editor’s Note: This article, by nature of the topic, may include language that is considered sensitive and/or vulgar to some readers. ...