Rebecca Saxe

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…

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…

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…