History Meets Science

How Writing and Meditation Actually Change Your Brain Is it possible to become smarter — or is intelligence fixed for life? That question followed me through school. I constantly wished I thought more clearly. The wish never went away. Over time it hardened into a conviction: clearer thinking leads to higher income, better decisions, and stronger relationships. Looking back, my only real regret is not starting sooner. I eventually found two simple but powerful habits that made a genuine difference to my cognitive clarity: writing and meditation. Daily writing trained my mind to think in structured, logical patterns. It cut through vague impressions and forced precision. I became more organized, more analytical, and far more deliberate — not only in my work, but in how I communicated and carried myself. Meditation reinforces that change. I practice it whenever I can — morning, afternoon, or evening — focusing on my breath. Breath-focused meditation is extensively studied ...

I jog about six miles after work three or four times a week. It's a simple routine — nothing special. But one evening last December, something happened that I still can't forget. Out of nowhere, I heard a faint hissing sound — and then a flaming object streaked across the sky and was gone. My first thought was, "Was that a meteor?" Something felt different, though — there was no way to know for sure, and I couldn't shake the feeling it was space debris. When I got home, I searched to see if anyone else had seen something like it. It wasn't as rare as I'd assumed — plenty of people described the same thing: a burning object falling out of the sky. I hadn't just seen it. I'd heard it — and it had sounded alarmingly close. What if something like that hit a person? What if it crashed into someone's house or car? Who would be responsible for that? I'd read about space debris before. This time, it didn...

Nancy Grace Roman: The Astronomer Who Built Hubble Roman spent two decades arguing for a telescope she would never operate. By the time Hubble reached orbit in 1990, she had been out of the executive post for eleven years. Illustration created for this article; not a historical photograph. I keep coming back to the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina : "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What has stuck with me has nothing to do with marriage plots. It is the claim underneath it — that trouble is never generic. It arrives with a shape. And when I read about people who kept going in the face of active discrimination, that shape usually turns out to be the most revealing part of the story: the particular door that stayed shut tells you a great deal about the particular way someone learned to get around it. I first came across the name Nancy Grace Roman around 2020, when NASA announced it would name its next ...