Author: Ilana Ross

Stigler’s Law, for you non-math types, states that no theorem is named for the actual person who dreamed it up and proved it in longhand. In other words, no discovery is named for its true discoverer. And because of this collective disregard for the truth, we may never know the

The other night when I was hard at work—on my thesis, duh—I paused to consider the serious state of the world, or at least the world as it appears on HuffingtonPost.com. The usual matters troubled me: The horrendously public disintegration of the marriage of once-presidential-hopeful John Edwards, the boatloads of

When I was a young girl—15, maybe 16—my mother and I would have the occasional disagreement. I wasn’t allowed to have sugary cereal, but all I wanted to eat in the morning was Marshmallow Fluff-Pops. I couldn’t watch television past 10 p.m., which made it difficult for me to participate

Considering that I’m a humanities major, I actually know very little about what makes me a human. I have no idea how anything inside me works: how my legs receive a coded transmission from my brain when I put a foot forward or a hand into the cookie jar, how

Maybe I’m just more in tune with the natural world than you are, but lately, I’ve noticed that squirrels have been acting a little out of sorts. To me, squirrels have always been suspiciously undomesticated and populous creatures. And what with winter around the corner, I can see how the

When my cousin had minor surgery last year, he decided he wasn’t going to take it lying down. That is, he didn’t want to suffer alone. To brave the microscopic laser and local anesthetic, he’d need a support system. Someone or somewhere so that he could talk through the nausea,

The night Barack Obama found out he was to receive the Nobel Prize, I was having a humbling experience of my own. Though I’m a semester and a half from a college degree, I could not make my bed. I don’t know whether it was because my foam mattress pad

From my window, I can casually overhear (eavesdrop on) a lot of interesting and pertinent conversations and see a lot of friends (spy on strangers). People argue about just about everything. Collins or Frary? Trays or no trays? Peach Ooh-la-long Honest Tea or Nantucket Nectars Half-and-Half? Emperor Palpatine or Lord