When Nietzsche wrote, “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders,” his aim was not to portray all forgetfulness as bliss, but rather to encourage a healthier relationship with our past and our memory.

The Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center moved one critical step closer to detecting the neurodegenerative disease — which has previously only been studied through post-mortem...