The nocturnal songs of nightingales have captivated artists, poets and musicians for generations. Folk singer Sam Lee celebrates their annual return through intimate nighttime duets — performed in total darkness — that blend human voice and nightingale song.

Turns out there is an emerging science of uncertainty — a new frontier in psychology, artificial intelligence, and surgery — where things can go very wrong when people are missing a crucial skill set: being unsure. Maggie Jackson explains.

Fasting is an ancient practice that’s experiencing something of a revival right now in health and fitness circles. But when John Oakes set out to explore the concept, he took it a lot deeper.

Journalist Zoë Schlanger has been tracking the new science of plant intelligence. Plants can exhibit some of the same behaviors as animals with nervous systems, including decision-making and elaborate defenses against predators.

When painter Sougwen Chung paints something in collaboration with an AI she trained — say, a black oil-paint brush stroke — a robot mimics Chung. But at some point, the robot continues without Chung and paints something new. So how creative is AI?

Does AI have a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than the human mind? Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn is fascinated by this question. Her investigation into machine intelligence became a very personal journey, which led her down the rabbit hole into questions about creativity and the nature of transcendence.

Writer Lowry Pressly argues that privacy is more than just about protecting the personal information you generate; it’s also choosing what to generate at all. It’s a fundamental tool for living our best possible lives.

Hip-hop artist Dxtr Spits realized that his mental health issues were rooted in the toxicity of masculinity, which limited how he could express his feelings. So he started the "How Men Cry" movement, which teaches men how to cry.

When an actor cries on stage during a theater production or in a film, what are they really doing? Jen Plants says when an actor cries on stage, it’s a lot more complicated, and important, than you think.

Puzzle constructors like Anna Shechtman are pushing to make crosswords more socially and linguistically inclusive. She writes about gender and puzzles in her memoir “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle.”

Psychedelic therapy has shown great promise for treating depression, but it's still unclear why exactly it works. Psychiatrist Charles Raison wants to know if it's the drug or the trip that makes psychedelics so potent. Is it biology or consciousness?

Honey Rose is part of the next generation of witches. They perform traditional magic on TikTok, do tarot readings via email, and seek to control social media algorithms with spells. Producer Angelo Bautista wanted to learn more.

The 1980s were a golden age for witches. Women everywhere started covens. Among them, the girls field hockey team at Danvers High School in Massachusetts. At least, that’s how Quan Barry imagines it in her recent novel, “We Ride Upon Sticks.”

Annabel Abbs-Streets found a way to creatively and spiritually embrace her sleepless hours. She writes about what she discovered in a book called “Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self.”