In the mid-noughties, when music by the Killers and Franz Ferdinand blared out of every pub and nightclub I passed, I spent my days and nights struggling through a Ph. D.

The line to get inside spills out the door. It’s so packed that a security guard is now only letting patrons go one in, one out. There’s nary a space to park in the small lot, and forget about nabbing ...

In 1945, as the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert, Enrico Fermi stood miles away, holding a few scraps of paper. As the shockwave rolled toward him, he dropped the papers and watched ...