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“I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on? The question predates Berger’s interest in it by centuries. In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos.

When he was seventeen years old, the artist and illustrator Chris Foss read a glowing newspaper review of “Whaam!,” the diptych painting by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which was heavily inspired by a panel from a 1962 comic book. “I remember being completely outraged,” Foss said. “The world was going mad over this blown-up comic-book panel, and all I could think about was the original artist, the person who arranged the dots and who was being completely overlooked. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?” In October, “Ornamental Despair,” a 1994 painting by the British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science-fiction illustration that Foss created for a men’s magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds.

In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested. In this sense, all science is historical science. We make observations about past events, based on everything from data gathered in the laboratory yesterday to remnants of phenomena, like meteor impacts or stellar explosions, which may have happened billions of years ago. We then use them to make predictions about the future, about experiments or observations that have not yet taken place. To quibble about how long ago the original data was generated is to miss the point

This is part of what I have come to call “conflict code”: words whose plain English meanings are politicized, distorted or undermined in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which is much more a clash of narratives than a tussle over territory. In November, the International Press Institute issued “Use With Care,” a guide to more than 75 “alternative words and phrases” for “loaded language” on this beat.“There are words that can cause some audiences to simply shut down and stop listening,” the preface reads. “We all understand that words can only mediate reality, not define it. But words are also powerful, and they play a major role in shaping our consciousness and perceptions.”

The nearest living relative of the passenger pigeon is a bird called the band-tailed pigeon, which lives in the western United States and in Canada. The theory behind Revive & Restore’s resurrection effort—which, it should be noted, has a staff of one—is that, with some very sophisticated genetic slicing and dicing, a band-tailed pigeon embryo could be converted into a passenger pigeon embryo. This embryo could then be transferred to a band-tailed pigeon egg and raised by band-tailed pigeon parents.

In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.

Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.