Wallace Stevens is one of the most perplexing of the major modern poets. His poetry, as even his most ardent admirers agree, is very difficult to follow, and his personal life cuts against the grain of commonplace beliefs about the lives of modern poets. Stevens was neither a bohemian, nor a drunk, nor a professor. In fact he was a successful insurance lawyer in Connecticut, and became a vice p...

Darwin realized that his theory could have no principled exception for humans. He put the famous teaser, ―Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,‖ near the end of The Origin of Species. If his evolutionary account made an exception for the human species, the whole edifice might be questioned. As the Quarterly Review's reviewer of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation t...

The biologist Paul Ehrlich came to public attention in 1968 with the publication of his book, The Population Bomb. Worries about the potential problems of a soaring global population had boiled and cooled over previous decades. And the issue had become so enmeshed with political decisions that many just wished to ignore it. The warnings of Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth century writer who had h...

Moses Maimonides was born in Cordova, the capital of Moorish Spain, on 30 March 1135. His father, Maimon, was a judge of the Jewish religious courts. Until the family fled to Fez in 1159, because of religious persecution, Maimonides was a pupil of the philosopher– physician Averroes (1126–98). From Morocco the family moved on to Palestine and then to Egypt. Shortly after arriving in Cairo, his ...