I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

Loftus grew up with a cold father who taught her nothing about love but everything about angles. A mathematician, he showed her the beauty of the triangle’s strong tip, the circumference of the circle, the...

Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus’s findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys...

I didn’t know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

It is a fundamental misperception,” Fouts says to me, “to think human life has more value than any other life form.

… instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, “We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials.” She took rifle...

…tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation…. the window rosy with anemic November light.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking,...

I looked up “skin” in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body’s largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway...

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

…the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.