Human Meme

Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the...

Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Alesia, and then did something stranger than a siege. Caesar built two walls, one...

This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The...

So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took...

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The...

Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest...

Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great...

Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of...

There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between...

In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace...

In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other...

The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin...

I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old...

The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade...

There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a...