All essays filed in this edition, newest first.
A Vienna cafe, a young psychologist, and the strange grip unfinished tasks hold on the human mind.
In 1954 a psychologist turned two dozen ordinary boys into enemies, then tried to make them friends again.
The most famous test in psychology may have measured trust, not willpower.
How a Yale psychologist proved that ordinary people will harm a stranger on command.
A Renaissance beauty trick, a Chicago psychologist, and the involuntary signal your pupils cannot suppress.
How a coached demonstration became the most cited proof that anyone can turn cruel.
In 1963, a San Diego teenager went eleven days without sleep, and sleep science has been arguing about it ever since.
Every night your brain climbs down through four stages and back again, and almost none of it is rest.
A century of trying to read deception in the body, and why the science never held.
Most of what you call flavor happens in your nose. The mouth speaks a far smaller language.
How a single chemical reaction turns flat raw ingredients into the deepest flavors we know.
Every eye carries a patch of nothing, and the brain spends every waking second painting over it.
Why the calorie on your food package is a 19th-century estimate your 21st-century body politely ignores.
How Linus Pauling convinced a generation that vitamin C could stop a cold, and why the science never followed.
How a single scientist's selective data turned fat into a villain and sugar into a Trojan horse.
How a banana company, a chemist's hunch, and a discredited scale built the superfood industry.