A conversation with Francis Collins. Editor’s note: Science in Focus is on vacation in July, so we’re going to the archives for science-related pieces from the pages of Books & Culture. This week ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

In his beguiling poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens recalls a past era when religion was meant to explain everything, “when bishops’ books / Resolved the world.” But, as he reminds us, “we ...