A new wave of memes came up with “intellectual carcinization,” describing the situation where multiple people have converged on the same idea. It’s delightful to reference crabs when ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of ...

Unfortunately, some people derive mistaken ideas from what is obscure. The sage Nachmanides is an example. Without criticizing Nachmanides, I showed in my book “Nachmanides, An Unusual Thinker ...

Everyone must be open, occasionally, to freshening stale thinking. Accepting false or mistaken ideas can stifle the truth until it eventually worms its way out for all but the most indoctrinated.

We often have this mistaken idea that a creative idea is a big idea. For example, the invention of manned flight, the cure for polio, the creation of the World Wide Web, and the development of a ...

Sometimes intense emotions are mistaken for true love when ... These can have a romantic appearance and wrap you in the idea that you're in love, when in fact, you're just trying to fill emotional ...