David Boles: Human Meme

Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you...

Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food a...

Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, ...

The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch i...

Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone abo...

"Taking the black pill" names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men's forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on ...

Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, ...

The concept of spiritual and moral hollowness that T.S. Eliot crystallized in "The Hollow Men" (1925) emerged from a crisis of meaning that...

A persistent gap between public imagination and technical reality defines the common understanding of artificial intelligence. The popular ...

The old archivist, Dr. Aris Thorne, felt a jolt of audacious heresy as he slid the glossy print into the maw of the machine. It was a photo...

In the sprawling, often-anonymous landscape of the internet, a persistent shadow lurks, eager to sow discord and inflict reputational harm:...

It's a wonderfully curious thing, isn't it, how two little words like "less" and "fewer" can stir up so much conversation and, at times, ev...

So, after all this time, have we ever actually found evidence of alien life on Earth? It's a question that gets to the heart of our place i...

The cosmos harbors many mysteries, but few capture our imagination as completely as black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity so domi...

Nowhere was the tension between local and standard time more vivid than in Indiana. Before 2006, the state was a confusing patchwork of time observance. Some counties followed Daylight Saving, while others steadfastly refused. Some aligned with Chicago on Central Time, others with Ohio on Eastern Time. Locals became "time-bilingual." A dentist in Jasper might advertise appointments at 9 a.m. "slow," knowing that patients driving fr...