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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

You know Carl Linnaeus, right? The great Swedish naturalist who categorized plants and animals in the 1750s? He was a singular figure in botany. But when he got a headache, he stopped being singular.

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 ...

Natural history museums don't usually tell their visitors, but they are riddled with wrongly identified specimens. Such errors even occur with important holdings, including plants and animals that ...