by Judith Hooper

About the author: Judith Hooper is a writer for Time magazine.

The disease is known to doctors as “irrational rationality” because it forces its victims to defy reason while seeming to embrace it. Characters as disparate as Howard Hughes, Lady Macbeth and Freud’s sexually conflicted “Rat Man” are among its victims. Today, in every elementary school of 200 pupils or so, three or four youngsters are likely to suffer from it. Howard Hughes’ symptoms included an insistence on having a germ-free environment and all his windows permanently sealed. The schoolchildren are more inclined to count cracks in the blacktop (for them, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” is frighteningly literal) or meticulously arrange their crayons in neat...