One day several years ago, I was reaching the end of my first visit with a patient, J.J., who had come to see me for anxiety andinsomnia. He was a salesman for a struggling telecommunications company, and he was having trouble managing the strain on his finances and his family. He was sleeping poorly, and as soon as he opened his eyes in the early morning, the worries began. “I wake up with a list of things to worry about,” he said. “I just go through the list, and it seems to get longer every day.” Read more…

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Empiricism, England’s greatest contribution to philosophy. Listen here…

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I am not an American,” Mark Twain once proclaimed, “I am the American.” He had good warrant for saying so. Of all the nation’s writers he is still considered the greatest – it’s not merely literary distinction but something even bigger than that. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with down-home Twainisms. Read more… 

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Antony Flew, an English philosopher and outspoken atheist who stunned and dismayed the unbelieving faithful when he announced in 2004 that God probably did exist, died April 8 in Reading, England. He was 87 and lived in Reading. Read more…

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Homage to the iconic author of Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" column

Last Saturday afternoon, on a Japanese-landscaped hillside at the outskirts of Atlanta, several clusters of people were constructing mathematically inspired sculptures of metal, bamboo and balloons. Nearby, a magician showed a mathematician how to "throw" a knot. Others had their photographs taken in an optical illusion they had built, an "impossible box" that from one perspective made people look simultaneously behind and inside it. Around a goldfish pond, groups did puzzles, origami, juggling and card tricks. A magician, a philosopher and a software engineer argued about Wittgenstein. Read more…

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"The Stories of Ray Bradbury"—a 1,112-page Everyman's Library anthology to be published April 6, a few months ahead of its author's 90th birthday on Aug. 22—is filled with fictional wonders. Among them: time-travelers who take refuge from a fearful future in an anxious past; a children's playroom where the videotronic lions have real teeth; an ocean-dwelling dinosaur that falls in love with a lighthouse. Read more…

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