Stories By Van

Like mortals, the gods could take each other as husband and wife, and would bear children. Sometimes though, a child could be born into the world as a terrible, misshapen form and be seen as a ‘monster’ by others, even their own parents. Such was the case with the Hecatonchires, also named the Hundred-Handed Ones. Mortals can see the helplessness of a newborn baby just by the way that the child cannot yet control its limbs or facial expressions; they see these motions as endearing, and cute even. Something about the baby’s helplessness is a part of what makes us want to care and nurture them. And the gods are no exception to this in life. And like mortals, they too are also able to see a monstrosity when it is born, as was the case with the Hecatonchires. Picture not a normal baby with two flailing arms, but one with 100 quivering, shaking, and unmatched limbs. Added to this were 50 wailing heads with wide-open mouths, producing furious cries that shook Olympus itself. Im...

The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person ("He is nice!") impacts your evaluations of that person's specific traits ("He is also smart!"). One great example of the halo effect in action is our overall impression of celebrities. Since we perceive them as attractive, successful, and often likable, we also tend to see them as intelligent, kind, and funny. Definitions of the Halo Effect "Also known as the physical attractiveness stereotype and the "what is beautiful is good" principle, the halo effect, at the most specific level, refers to the habitual tendency of people to rate attractive individuals more favorably for their personality traits or characteristics than those who are less attractive. Halo effect is also used in a more general sense to describe the global impact o...

First, there is the basic existentialist standpoint, that existence precedes essence, has primacy over essence. Man is a conscious subject, rather than a thing to be predicted or manipulated; he exists as a conscious being, and not in accordance with any definition, essence, generalization, or system. Existentialism says I am nothing else but my own conscious existence. A second existentialist theme is that of anxiety, or the sense of anguish, a generalized uneasiness, a fear or dread which is not directed to any specific object. Anguish is the dread of the nothingness of human existence. This theme is as old as Kierkegaard within existentialism; it is the claim that anguish is the underlying, all-pervasive, universal condition of human existence. Existentialism agrees with certain streams of thought in Judaism and Christianity which see human existence as fallen, and human life as lived in suffering and sin, guilt and anxiety. This dark and foreboding picture of human life...

A letter was recently published in Nature on 329,000 young people identifying 74 genetic variants—spelling mistakes in single nucleotides in the six billion letter human genome—which can be used to predict nearly 20 percent of the variation in school years completed, a quantitative trait of fortitude which is correlated to general intelligence, and which you can learn about by sequencing your own genome. Staple that to your college application. Even before the “molecular age,” we were on guard for the slightest tips that show we are more or less valued than our peers. But there was also caution from the academics that there was actually very little we could do to leverage our biology for improvement. In 1924, the Harvard geneticist William Castle quipped that “we are scarcely as yet in a position to do more than make ourselves ridiculous in this matter. We are no more in a position to control eugenics than the tides of the ocean.” Enter Crispr-Cas9, the first pair o...

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have put an end to World War II, but they weren’t the only destructive weaponry developed during the war. From nerve and disease agents to the feared and coveted V-1 and V-2 rockets, Nazi scientists worked on an impressive arsenal. As the war came to a close in 1945, both American and Russian officials began scheming to get that technology for themselves. So it came to pass that 71 years ago today, 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States and were promptly put to work for Uncle Sam. In the days and weeks after Germany’s surrender, American troops combed the European countryside in search of hidden caches of weaponry to collect. They came across facets of the Nazi war machine that the top brass were shocked to see, writer Annie Jacobsen told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. Jacobson wrote about both the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scie...

If someone vehemently argues that President John F. Kennedy's assassination was "an inside job," that Princess Diana was murdered or that the U.S. government knew about the attack on New York City's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and declined to stop it, they might also skip vaccinations, according to a new study. Researchers recently discovered a connection between beliefs in some conspiracy theories and mistrust of vaccines, and it appears across borders. Their findings, described in a new study, are based on survey responses from thousands of people representing dozens of nations. The scientists were searching for clues to the psychology of anti-vaccination sentiments — despite scant evidence that vaccines are harmful — and they found that people who were the most distrustful of vaccines were also the ones with the strongest beliefs in certain conspiracy theories — regardless of their level of education. Vaccines for preventable diseases ...

Our lifelong struggle to learn how to live is inseparable from two facts only: that of our mortality and that of our dread of it, dread with an edge of denial. Half a millennium ago — a swath of time strewn with the lives and deaths of everyone who came before us — Montaigne captured this paradox in his magnificent meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Centuries later, John Updike — a mind closer to our own time but now swept by mortality to the same nonexistence as Montaigne — echoed the sentiment when he wrote: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead, so why… be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” How to live with what lies behind that perennial “why” is what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips examines in Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories — a rather unusual and insightf...