Without a wife and a well-functioning household, Carl Linnaeus would have had difficulty becoming the prominent scientist that he was. Mastering social codes, like clothing and hosting guests for ...

He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that? The future father of modern taxonomy was born in Råshult, a village in southern ...

Broberg, a widely admired authority on Linnaeus, died in 2022. “The Man Who Organized Nature,” capably translated by Anna Paterson, is his last book, the summation of a lifetime of research. Among the ...

I’ve just spent the past 30 hours at the Chautauqua Institution, the lovely village of ideas out in western New York State. Each week they bring in people to talk about a theme, and this week is a ...

The struggle to comprehend existence is the struggle to comprehend origins. This also goes for the life of the mind, where ideas evolve as blindly and forcefully as in the life of the body. The ...

Last spring I traveled with my husband, Peter, to Uppsala, an ancient city northwest of Stockholm on the gulf of Ekoln, one of the vast, inland-reaching bays of Sweden’s Lake Mälaren. Known for its ...