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Last week, Marvel launched a new Avengers movie, “Age of Ultron,” and this month it’s launching a new comic book, “A-Force.” Ultron is a robot with artificial intelligence who believes that the only way to achieve peace on earth is to exterminate the human race. The A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a “feminist paradise,” but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars.

Crohn’s disease affects as many as seven hundred thousand Americans, but, like other autoimmune disorders, it remains poorly understood and is considered incurable. (Autoimmune disorders are thought to arise when the immune system attacks healthy tissue, mistaking it for a threat.) The standard treatments for Crohn’s often don’t work, or work only temporarily, and many have serious side effects.

It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.

Thanks to the Internet, becoming a hypochondriac is much easier than it used to be. The easy availability of health information on the web has certainly helped countless people make educated decisions about their health and medical treatment, but it can be disastrous for people who are likely to worry. Hypochondriacs researching an illness used to have to scour books and ask doctors for information. Now a universe of information is available with a few mouse clicks. "For hypochondriacs, the Internet has absolutely changed things for the worse," says Brian Fallon, MD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the co-author of Phantom Illness: Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Hypochondria (1996). So far, no studies have been conducted on just how hypochondriacs use the Internet, Fallon says. But the phenomenon is common enough to have a snappy name -- "cyberchondria."

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’

But hold on a minute.

If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?

women” in 2013, Park Yu-ha wrote that she felt “a bit fearful” of how it might be received. After all, she said, it challenged “the common knowledge” about the wartime sex slaves.But even she was not prepared for the severity of the backlash.In February, a South Korean court ordered Ms. Park’s book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” redacted in 34 sections where it found her guilty of defaming former comfort women with false facts. Ms. Park is also on trial on the criminal charge of defaming the aging women, widely accepted here as an inviolable symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan and its need for historical justice, and she is being sued for defamation by some of the women themselves.

n a dissenting opinion in 1981, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote that “eyewitness identification evidence is notoriously unreliable.” Dozens of scientific studies support this claim. Nevertheless, eyewitness testimony continues to be used widely, and many criminal cases hinge on it almost exclusively. Since 1989, two hundred and eighty people have been exonerated of sexual-assault charges in the U.S. Nearly three-quarters of those wrongful convictions relied, in whole or in part, on a mistaken identification by an eyewitness. Psychologists have long recognized that human memory is highly fallible. Hugo Münsterberg taught in one of the first American psychology departments, at Harvard. In a 1908 book called “On the Witness Stand,” he argued that, because people could not know when their memories had deceived them, the legal system’s safeguards against lying—oaths, penalties for perjury, and so on—were ineffective. He expected that teachers, doctors, and politicians would all be eager to reform their fields. “The lawyer alone is obdurate,” Münsterberg wrote.

Marsh, who is now sixty-five, is one of Britain’s foremost neurosurgeons. He is a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London, and he helped to pioneer a kind of surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anesthesia, so that they can converse with their surgeons while they operate, allowing them to avoid damaging what neurosurgeons call “eloquent,” or useful, parts of the brain. Marsh has been the subject of two documentary films. Still, he writes, “As I approach the end of my career I feel an increasing obligation to bear witness to past mistakes I have made.” A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed. “The more I thought about the past,” he recalls in his book, “the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond.”

The researcher who met with S. that day was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Luria, whose fame as a founder of neuropsychology still lay before him. Luria began reeling off lists of random numbers and words and asking S. to repeat them, which he did, in ever-lengthening series. Even more remarkably, when Luria retested S. more than fifteen years later, he found those numbers and words still preserved in S.’s memory. “I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” Luria writes in his famous case study of S., “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” published in 1968 in both Russian and English.