Mike Jay

Why​ do we sleep? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the...

In​ 1770 a new perfume shop opened in the centre of Paris on the rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, a fragrant oasis adjoining a district that was, according to one contemporary, ‘by far the worst-smelling place in the world’. This stretch of the Right Bank was home to an abattoir, a fish market, a butcher, an overcrowded prison and a mortuary, whose combined effluvia flowed...

I’m​ trying to remember the last time I saw someone standing by the side of the road with their thumb out, holding a cardboard sign. Like innumerable other bygones – the last milk bottle on a doorstep, the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my...

On​ 25 August 1835, the New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a...

It​ was during the fallout from Watergate that the American public first heard of MK-Ultra, the most notorious of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In...