We reached Thank God Ledge on the Regular Northwest Face, of Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome climb, by mid-afternoon. This 40-foot horizontal plank-like feature is the most famous part…

The reactions to Carl Fisher’s Nautilus essay, “Against Willpower,” ranged from the appreciative to the sorely defensive. Why should we be asked to give up the idea of willpower?…

You don’t have to look very hard to see that our culture has some pretty powerful associations between colors and feelings. As a recent example, the new Pixar film Inside Out has…

For weeks I had been researching what science has to say about the power of charisma. Why do some people so clearly have it and others don’t? Why do we fall so easily under its influence?…

In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit IV, a set of black and white tessellated angels and demons. The art,…

I had a tough time in high school. Like many other young adolescents, I saw myself as fundamentally flawed, and felt a searing isolation. Nothing I looked forward to brought any hope.…

Thomas1 was a highly successful and mild-mannered lawyer who was worried about his drinking. When he came to see me at my psychotherapy practice, his wine intake had crept up to six…

“Luck is believing you’re lucky.”—Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire In 1995, a wounded 35-year-old woman named Anat Ben-Tov gave an interview from her hospital room…

Whenever the Kingdom of Hyrule has been in danger, a young boy named Link has risen to the challenge of saving the land from all manner of pixelated evil. The latest chapter of Link’s…

Marc Feldman has spent more than 25 years studying fakes, but the bespectacled Alabama-based psychiatrist still vividly recalls the woman who introduced him to what became his life’s…