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From the archives

That Ever Governed Frenzy

Through the eyes of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Michael Wernick

Jeffrey Simpson

Rumble on Parliament Hill

In the ring with Justin Trudeau

Curtis Gillespie

Return of the Robber Barons

Chrystia Freeland asks if we can tell “makers” from “takers” among the new super-rich

Donald J. Johnston
Our Contributors

Rebecca Saxe

Rebecca Saxe researches the cognitive neuroscience of social cognition—how we think about other minds—in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Articles by
Rebecca Saxe

"But We Were Feeling Happy"

Can the paradoxes of human emotion be best explained by art or by experimental psychology? May 2005
On May 15, 1916, the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and five of his men sailed up King Haakon Bay, on the western side of South Georgia Island in the Atlantic Ocean. All six were bruised and battered, with bursting frostbite blisters covering their faces, hands and legs. Over the preceding three weeks these men had sailed their tiny…

Your Brain: Flexible or Hard-Wired?

A new book’s claims about brain plasticity may be overstated January–February 2008
On the back surface of each of your eyes, there is a scrawny, upside-down image with a hole in it, containing about two thirds of the scene in front of you. Over the first fraction of a second after light from the world reaches your eyes, this image is transformed by your brain into a single stable and richly detailed perception of the three-dimensional…

The Forbidden Experiment

A new history of wild children holds the experts to blame July–August 2006
In the seventh year of the French Republic (1799 in the rest of the world), the peasants of Tarn and Aveyron, in southern France, encountered a naked boy scavenging alone in their fields and forests. He did not speak, and did not seem to understand any French. At first, he ran away from other humans. More than once he was captured and brought to…