AuthorAurora

Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.” “I have a problem I...

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, Taar aaya hai. In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a taara telegramusually meant bad news. Few homes had...

Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no social media; and without binary codestrings of ones and zeroes that create computer programsno viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that...

Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children draws on thousands of pages of internal documents and over 100 hours of interviews with clinicians and service users.  One service user, Jacob’s, story is told here. * Jacob has never really seen himself as a girl. “Even when I was like a toddler, I would go by names from male characters I saw on TV,”...

You may have heard a story about women astronauts of the 1978 NASA class being given an absurd amount of tampons by clueless techs. It goes like this: Kathy Sullivan and Sally Ride, both members of the ’78 class, are asked to check a hygiene kit for women in space. Ride begins pulling out a series of tampons fused together in small sealed packages, sort of like links of sausage. And they just...