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I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalizations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the exis­tence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that, despite the uncontrollability of human behavior, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control; you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evi­dence, the qualitative narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.

One of the problems is that no narrative feature is going to be able to convey the absolute truth. Characters inevitably get conflated and information omitted.“I think if you have two hours to tell a story, you have to contract things, you have to make your point in ways that a documentary would make them differently,” says David Oyelowo, the British actor who portrays Martin Luther King Jr.

For anyone who has endured clichéd, condescending, uncomprehending, or otherwise aggravating depictions of classical music in American TV ads—the snobs at the symphony, the sopranos screaming under Valkyrie helmets, the badly edited bowdlerizations of the “Ode to Joy”—a new ad for the Apple iPad featuring the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen may come as a pleasant shock. It is, first of all, a cool, elegant piece of work—not surprising, given Apple’s distinguished history of television propaganda. Salonen is shown receiving inspiration for a passage in his Violin Concerto and trying it out in his iPad; then, after a montage of scenes in London and Finland, we see the violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Philharmonia Orchestra, of London, digging in to the score. More notably, it is musical: the concerto dictates the rhythm of the editing, and the correlation between notation and sound is made excitingly clear.

There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.

Since the late 19th century in the United States, critical responses to the spectacle of pain in executions have continued to spur ardent calls for the improvement of killing technology. One of the most prolific legal theorists of capital punishment, Austin Sarat, has concisely referred to this history: “The movement from hanging to electrocution, from electrocution to the gas chamber, from gas to lethal injection, reads like someone’s version of the triumph of progress, with each new technique enthusiastically embraced as the latest and best way to kill without imposing pain.” Recent debates over the administration of midazolam and pentobarbital, and in what dosage, seamlessly integrate themselves into Sarat’s grim progress narrative. The inexhaustible impulse to seek out less painful killing technologies puts a series of questions in sharp relief: What is, and should be, the role of pain in retributive justice? And how has the law come to rationalize the condemned’s experience of pain during an execution? While the Eighth Amendment stipulates the necessity of avoiding “cruel and unusual punishment,” in 1890 the Supreme Court decided this clause could mean that no method of execution should impose “something more than the mere extinguishment of life.” And then, in 1958, the court also determined that the amendment should reflect the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” If we were to consider the “standard of decency” in our society today, we would be pushed to ask: By what moral order have we continued to establish the “extinguishment of life” as something “mere,” and the pain of the condemned as excessive? In other words, how has the pain experienced during an execution become considered cruel and unconstitutional but not the very act of killing itself? We should dial back to older histories of law to tap into pain’s perennially vexed role in retributive theories of justice.

‘“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.

Extremists on all sides not only hijack religion and identity and narratives, they also hijack language to rationalize their violent ideology and their violent actions. I want to take it back and say, "No. Allahu akbar means God is great. I use it in prayer."

Zimbardo’s standard narrative of the Stanford prison experiment offers the prisoners’ emotional responses as proof of how powerfully affected they were by the guards’ mistreatment. The shock of real imprisonment provides a simpler and far less groundbreaking explanation. It may also have had legal implications, should prisoners have thought to pursue them. Korpi told me that the greatest regret of his life was failing to sue Zimbardo.