Frontiers of the Mind

I finally saw The Odyssey this week, and honestly, the monsters are what stuck with me most. Not because they’re scary, exactly, but because a few of them kept nagging at me afterward. Homer didn’t just pull these things out of thin air. Some of them, it turns out, might trace back to actual places,…

Cultures with no contact with each other, separated by oceans and thousands of years, kept arriving at the same basic idea. Something small, something magical, lives in the forest. It watches. It has rules. Break them, and you’ll regret it. That pattern shows up almost everywhere humans have ever lived near trees, which raises a…

Late at night, somewhere in a marsh or bog, a flickering light appears. It is the right height to be a lantern. It moves in a way that suggests purpose. You follow it. The path you were on disappears behind you. The light keeps moving. Eventually you realize the ground beneath your feet is not…

The idea behind kintsugi is quietly radical. When a piece of ceramic breaks, you do not throw it away and you do not disguise the damage. You glue it back together with lacquer, then trace the cracks in gold. The repaired object ends up more valuable than the original, not in spite of the damage…

After moving through every obstacle IVF could throw at us and finally, joyously getting pregnant (yaaay!), we were told we’d be continuing those painful, irritating, and absolutely necessary progesterone shots all the way through the first trimester. Early pregnancy is fascinating in its own strange way, since doctors calculate “Day 1” from the start of…

There is a creature in South Louisiana folklore that has been scaring children into obedience, keeping adults out of the swamp at night, and enforcing unwritten community rules for about three centuries. I only recently learned it started as a medieval French monster that crossed the Atlantic with exiled Acadians. The rougarou is the Cajun…

Comparing the embryo transfer to the egg retrieval, I’ll say this: the transfer was a breeze. A strange, fascinating, occasionally funny breeze, but a breeze nonetheless. Once we got the results back and knew we had a healthy little 5AA blastocyst ready to go, we scheduled the transfer for roughly a month out. The medication…

I want to start with the specifics because the specifics are what make this interesting. This is not just “lots of cultures have flood stories.” Lots of cultures have creation stories and trickster figures and underworld myths too, and some of that overlap is explained by shared human psychology and universal narrative structures. The flood…

The changeling story goes like this. You have a healthy baby. You go to sleep. In the night, the fairies come and swap your baby for one of their own. When you wake up, your baby is gone. What is lying in the cradle looks like your child, but it is not. It is too…

I have spent a lot of time reading about mythology and folklore, and I genuinely thought I had a decent handle on the scary ones. The Kraken. The Banshee. The Kelpie. Various bog entities and marsh spirits. I thought I knew the roster. Then I found out about the Nuckelavee and I want everyone to…

After months of trying superovulation to get pregnant without having to fully enter the world of IVF, we came to the conclusion that IVF was the right path for us. Month after month, the pregnancy tests came back negative. Month after month, hope built up just enough to be crushed all over again. Eventually the…

Sleep paralysis is a well-understood neurological event. It happens when your brain wakes up before your body does. During REM sleep, your brain paralyzes your muscles so you do not act out your dreams. Sometimes consciousness returns before the paralysis lifts. You are awake, you cannot move, and your brain is still partially in dream…

I want to say something before we get into this. The practices in this article are not curiosities. Not exotic spectacles to gawp at. These are what living communities, right now, do to honor their dead, maintain relationships with ancestors, and navigate one of the few experiences every human being shares. I find them genuinely…

I want to be honest with you upfront: I am a skeptic. I do not believe in ghosts. And I think almost every ghost photograph in existence has a perfectly mundane explanation involving double exposure, light leaks, pareidolia, or deliberate fraud. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is the one that makes me pause. Taken…

Palmistry is one of those things that exists in this weird space between total dismissal and genuine fascination. Most people think it’s fake. Most of those same people will absolutely let someone read their palm if the opportunity comes up. That tension has existed for thousands of years. The history of palmistry is not a…

I have been obsessed with Japanese folklore since before it was cool to be obsessed with Japanese folklore, and I will not be taking questions. Yokai are supernatural creatures from Japanese mythology, and the word itself translates roughly to “strange apparition.” It covers everything from terrifying demons to mischievous raccoon dogs to murderous river creatures…

I am thrilled to say that after a year and a half of trying, I am pregnant! Michael and I are very open when discussing that we did not have a traditional pregnancy journey. We regularly see that people treat the idea of fertility as a taboo topic, and we want to break that stigma…

We’re all burned out. Between work emails at midnight and the constant buzz of notifications, finding a place to actually unwind has become less of a luxury and more of a necessity. I mean, when was the last time you took a vacation without checking your phone every five minutes? There are still places on…

It’s amusing how, despite our reliance on science and hard work, humans remain hilariously superstitious. Whether you’re a software engineer or a professional athlete, a black cat crossing your path or spilling salt can make you momentarily question your luck. For centuries, we’ve held onto the idea of “luck” as a way to navigate a…

In modern life, it’s easy to forget where you came from. Childhood memories fade, old friends drift away, and experiences that shaped a person can feel distant. Yet revisiting the past, whether through people, places, or personal milestones, can be a powerful tool for self-discovery. Reconnecting with the past isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a way…

If you ever need proof that history can be just as wild as any movie, check out the Beast of Gévaudan. For four truly terrifying years in the mid-1700s, a rural region of southern France was stalked by something locals simply could not identify: a wolf-like creature that was unnaturally huge, disturbingly bold, and terrifyingly…

Death has never been just an ending. In nearly every culture throughout history, it’s been a passage — one that’s guided, watched over, or even orchestrated by a mysterious figure often known as the Angel of Death. This entity, sometimes benevolent and sometimes terrifying, embodies humanity’s oldest questions about what happens when life’s final moment…

Every few years, the internet manages to dig up some obscure piece of history, dust it off, and transform it into a massive, global mystery. Right now, that word is Tartaria—or as the most dedicated online detectives prefer to call it, “The Lost Empire of Tartaria.” The story that gets passed around on YouTube channels…

Luck is one of those things that sits quietly in the background of our lives — always there, always influencing us, even when we don’t realize it. It’s the invisible variable in every plan we make, every decision we second-guess, every story we tell ourselves about why things worked out or didn’t. Some people swear…

We’ve all had them — those dreams that keep coming back, again and again. Maybe you’ve dreamt your teeth were crumbling in your hands, or that you were falling from an endless height, or standing in a crowded room only to realize… you’re completely naked. You wake up shaken, embarrassed, or just plain confused, thinking:…