For more than a century, nearly everyone agreed on the story: the vibrator was built so Victorian doctors could relieve their female patients of "hysteria." It is a wonderful story. It is also, according to the documented record, mostly untrue — and the real history is far stranger.

Dinner ended an hour ago. Nothing else was planned. Then, somewhere between the dishwasher starting and the second half of an episode, the kitchen begins making a case for itself — politely at first, then with real conviction.

Ask most women to point out the clitoris on a diagram and the finger lands in the right place immediately. Ask what shape the rest of it takes, and the answers thin out fast. That gap is not a lapse of attention. It is a lapse in the material: for most of the twentieth century, the diagrams handed…

The human body runs two separate sweat systems, and only one of them was built for cooling. The other — the apocrine system — sits in a narrow set of places: the underarms, the areolae, and the sub-pelvic and perineal region. It stays dormant through childhood, switches on at puberty, and produces…

Somewhere in the first year or two of living together, most couples quietly invent a language. Nobody sits down and drafts it. It assembles itself out of habit and repetition until a lamp left on at a certain angle, or the sound of a particular drawer opening, carries more meaning than a sentence…

There is a particular moment, usually somewhere around 7:40 on a weekday morning, that needs almost no description. The drawer is open. The drawer is empty. And somewhere in the back of the closet, zipped inside a beach bag from a trip two summers ago, there is a bikini bottom that is technically…

A change of address does not reliably produce desire. The research on holidays finds small average gains in wellbeing that fade soon after ordinary life resumes. The research on women's desire keeps returning to conditions — sleep, quiet, the absence of low-grade vigilance — rather than to scenery.

The three things working against comfort on a long-haul flight are dry air, reduced cabin pressure, and hours of stillness in one position. Two of them are decided before you leave the house — by what you wear and what sits in the seat pocket rather than in the overhead bin. The third is decided by…

For most of the twentieth century, the largest structure in the human body devoted entirely to sensation went unmapped, unlabelled, and in several editions of the standard anatomy text, unmentioned altogether.