Humans are storytelling animals. We thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens -- murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. But the addiction runs deeper than we think. We can...

A few years ago, I was driving down the road on a beautiful day, cheerfully spinning the FM dial. A country music song filled the cab: Chuck Wick's "Stealing Cinderella."

My usual response to this kind of catastrophe is to flail at the radio until the noise stops. But...

In 2006, I attended the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Austin, Texas and listened to E. O. Wilson -- the founder of sociobiology and one of the greatest biologists since Darwin -- deliver the keynote address. Wilson, about 75 years old at the time, didn't...