He is the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes that he did not have to share with anybody. He worked out why atoms hold together at all. He found the shape a protein folds into, and got it right while the best crystallographers in Britain were getting it wrong. He proved that a disease could...

He solved the problem of the missing planet in a few weeks, and told almost no one how. He worked out the geometry of curved space decades before anyone published it, and locked the pages in a drawer. He wrote his most explosive result about an asteroid as a coded cipher, so that he could claim...

Nos enseñan que la generosidad siempre es una virtud, que quien da más es mejor persona y que el amor se mide por cuánto de nosotros mismos estamos dispuestos a entregar. Pero ¿qué sucede cuando dar deja de nacer de la plenitud y empieza a nacer del miedo: miedo al rechazo, a la...

His family cut stone in Salzburg for three generations. Christian Doppler was too frail to lift it, so he was sent off to do arithmetic instead, which everyone agreed was a lesser calling. In May 1842, in a half-empty room in Prague, he stood up before a learned society and explained why the...

In 1948 a shy, unicycling engineer at Bell Laboratories published a paper that quietly rebuilt the twentieth century, and he did it by refusing to answer the most interesting question in his field. Claude Shannon wanted to know how much could be sent through a wire. He did not want to know what...

Two sisters. One guest. A quiet decision that quietly runs your whole life.We know the scene without having to be told it. One sister works herself ragged getting dinner on the table. The other simply sits and listens. For centuries the busy sister has been scolded and the quiet one praised, and...

We are the best-informed, best-supplied, longest-living human beings who have ever existed, and a startling number of us go through the day with the quiet sense that the floor is not entirely attached to the building. Not fear of anything nameable. Just a low hum underneath an ordinary Tuesday...

A surgeon glances at a patient and says, before any test comes back, that something is wrong. A negotiator hears one sentence and knows the deal is dead. A mother wakes a moment before her child cries. We call this intuition, and we treat it as a small miracle, a whisper from somewhere beyond...

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs — and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci...

Somewhere inside every one of us lives an accountant. He keeps a ledger of who owes what, tallies every slight, and calls the balance justice. He is not a villain. He is the reason civilization works. He is also the reason you cannot sleep at three in the morning, prosecuting an argument that...

We are taught that generosity is always a virtue, that the person who gives more is the better person, and that love is measured by how much of ourselves we are willing to hand away. But what happens when giving stops coming from fullness and starts coming from fear—fear of being rejected, of...

He was a surgeon who quarreled with his own profession, an inventor who carried the hospital to the battlefield, a communist in a country that distrusted the word, and a difficult, proud, restless man who became a national hero on the far side of the world. Norman Bethune left Canada because his...

A hundred years ago, a Russian priest who had trained himself into a physiologist watched a cat that was interrupted in the middle of a private act. The animal did not stop and turn to the interruption, as every rule of the day insisted it should. It bore down harder. From that stubborn creature...

Fred Hoyle worked out where you came from. Not in the vague way that phrase is usually meant, but atom by atom: the calcium in your teeth, the iron riding in your blood, the oxygen you are using right now to read this sentence. All of it was assembled inside stars that died before the Sun was...

He was not a doctor. He was admitted to the Academy of Medicine by a majority of exactly one vote, and once, after explaining to that same Academy where chicken cholera comes from, he was challenged to a duel by an eighty-year-old orthopedic surgeon who did not believe in germs and did not...

Dos hermanas. Una invitada. Una decisión silenciosa que, en silencio, marca el rumbo de toda tu vida. Conocemos la escena sin necesidad de que nos la cuenten. Una hermana se esfuerza al máximo para preparar la cena. La otra simplemente se sienta y escucha. Durante siglos, a la hermana...

The failures that ought to trouble us are not the hard ones. Famine relief is complicated; peace settlements are complicated; climate is complicated. The troubling failures are the easy ones. Conflicts that run for thirty years and end on terms both sides could have written in an afternoon...

We are taught to treat innocence as a phase. It is the thing the world is supposed to take from us, the softness we are expected to outgrow on the way to becoming serious, competent, unfoolable adults. To be called innocent, past a certain age, is to be gently insulted. This book argues that we...

A man asked what looked like a simple question, and he expected a simple answer. Who is my neighbor? He wanted a line drawn on a map, a fence around his obligation, so he could know exactly whom he was required to love and feel at peace about everyone on the other side. He did not get a line. He...

Three men are handed a fortune and told nothing. Two put the money at risk. One buries his share, keeps it perfectly safe, and returns every coin of it. He is the only one condemned— and he is the only one who lost nothing. Most of us spend a third of our waking lives inside arrangements we...