In Chapter 12 of the Zhuangzi, “Heaven and Earth,” Zigong, a disciple of Confucius, encounters an old man watering his vegetable garden. The gardener carries water from a well in a jar, working hard and accomplishing little. Zigong explains that a wooden lever with a counterweight could raise the water

Neanderthals did not spend their long existence awaiting extinction. They were people focused on getting through another winter. They hunted, raised children, cared for their injured, and survived changes in climate that would have killed less adaptable creatures. They had no reason to imagine that, one day, their kind would

When I was studying psychology in college, I once spoke with a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia. I no longer remember most of our conversation. I remember one sentence. “All humans are schizophrenic. They all hear voices. We just hear more.” I was young enough to assume I understood the distinction

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client has suffered from a public relations problem for approximately 13.8 billion years. The charge is familiar. Nonlife is said to be inert, lifeless, empty, and without purpose. It is treated as the backdrop against which the real drama of existence unfolds. Life,

For many years I assumed memory worked like a filing cabinet. Experiences happened, were neatly stored away somewhere in the mind, and later could be retrieved just as they occurred. Age has persuaded me otherwise. Memory is not a storage room. It is a conversation. The faces of many men