My brother sent me a subscription to the British magazine New Scientist last Christmas. I love it. It arrives once a week and sits, like a center piece, in the middle of the kitchen table. Everyone in the family takes turns reading it, each finding, at different times during the week—over coffee and toast, before soccer practice, while the spaghetti sauce simmers—bits of articles that are so awesome we are compelled to read them aloud to one another. Oh my god, one of us will say, you have to hear this. Over the past year conversations at the kitchen table…