History is a collection of dates, facts, and figures, but on a deeper level, it’s a story that stitches those facts together. These stories get passed down from generation to generation, and according ...

Somewhere in Switzerland there’s a municipal archive, the collective memory of a town, with negatives and newspapers and postcards and photographs that tell the story of the area from 1880–1940. It’s ...

20 years after the September 11th terrorist attacks, many who witnessed the horror that day can still recall images of the two burning towers, dust-covered crowds running to safety through the streets ...

When a plane crashes or goes missing, we become obsessed with knowing exactly what happened. Such tragedies, though statistically rare, capture our attention because it feels inexplicable to lose so ...

The 2016 US Presidential campaign and its aftermath have energized international dialogue on the prominence and proliferation of ideological echo chambers, fake news, and so-called “alternative facts.

The Atacama desert, 2022. (Photo by John Moore / Getty Images) After her mother begins to experience inexplicable fainting episodes, Nona Fernández finds herself sitting behind a screen in a doctor’s ...

In the last century, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs declared that personal memories are influenced by their social contexts. From this perspective, the memory function of individuals cannot be ...

It takes me about 45 minutes to get to work, depending on traffic. Since I don’t bring a car, those long commutes have become a quiet ritual of conversation with ride-sharing drivers. Often, it starts ...

Individual bacterial cells have short memories. But groups of bacteria can develop a collective memory that can increase their tolerance to stress. This has been demonstrated experimentally for the ...

Every memoir is in one sense an argument–a writer’s version of his or her past. But, as readers who cashed in their debunked copies of A Million Little Pieces know, recent memoirs have been just as ...